1. What Cause owns
The Cause platform — including its software, source code, user interface, brand marks, colour palette, typography choices, the "c" mark, the Aura voice, the Be voice, the "connection rule" framing, the Cause Web engine, the Record Studio, the imagery engine, and every piece of copy on this site — is the intellectual property of Cause (be-cause.world), Shane Paul, founder, and its future licensees. All rights reserved.
2. What you own
Everything you record on Cause — your Causes, replies, family thread messages, photos, videos, voice notes, text — belongs to you. Full stop. Cause never claims ownership of user-generated content. See the Terms § 3 for the limited license you grant Cause to store, deliver, and display your Cause inside the features you have opted into.
3. Trademarks
"Cause", "be-cause.world", "be-cause.life", "Aura" (as used by Cause), "Be" (as used by Cause), the lowercase "c" mark, and the phrase "connection before conversation" are trademarks of Cause. You may not use them, or anything confusingly similar, without written permission — including in company names, product names, domain names, social handles, press headlines, or marketing.
4. Copyright
All original content on the Cause platform — code, design, illustrations, product copy, the Manifesto, the "Who Cause is for" scenarios, this Legal set, the press release on /press, the founder biography — is copyright © Cause, 2025–present. Copying, republishing, or creating derivative works of Cause content requires prior written permission from press@be-cause.world.
5. What you may not do
You agree not to (a) reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract Cause's source code, (b) scrape the platform or automate access without written permission, (c) train any AI or machine-learning model on Cause content (whether platform copy or user-generated Causes) without explicit consent from Cause and, where applicable, the person who created that Cause, (d) copy Cause's design, brand, or product mechanics to build a competitor, (e) use Cause's marks to imply endorsement you do not have, (f) remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, trademark, or attribution notice.
6. Aura and Be are Cause's voices
The tone, sentence structure, and behavioural patterns of Aura (user-facing) and Be (admin-facing) are proprietary to Cause. You may not clone, imitate, or fine-tune a competing AI on Aura or Be transcripts without written permission.
7. Third-party assets
Cause uses stock photography from Unsplash under Unsplash's own licence, Fraunces and Inter typefaces under the SIL Open Font License, Shadcn UI primitives under MIT, and Lucide icons under ISC. Rights to those assets belong to their respective creators. Cause's arrangement, styling, and editorial pairing of those assets remain Cause's IP.
8. Reporting infringement
If you believe Cause is hosting content that infringes your copyright or trademark, email press@be-cause.world with (a) a description of the work you claim is infringed, (b) the URL on Cause where you see it, (c) your contact details, (d) a good-faith statement that the use is not authorised, and (e) a signed statement (electronic signature acceptable) that the information above is accurate. Cause will review promptly and, where appropriate, remove or restrict the material and notify the person who uploaded it.
9. If someone tells us your Cause infringes them
If Cause receives a notice that your Cause infringes someone else's rights, Cause may temporarily restrict access to that Cause while it is reviewed. You will be told, and you will have a chance to respond with a counter-notice.
10. Improvements and feedback
If you send Cause feedback, ideas, feature suggestions, or improvements — through the feedback form, email, social media, or any other channel — you grant Cause a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free right to use them without attribution or compensation. Cause is a small company; we can't track individual ideas back to individual people, and we don't want the friction that would come with trying. If this matters to you, please don't send unsolicited ideas.
11. Survives termination
These IP terms survive any termination of your Cause account. Even if you delete your account, Cause's ownership of the platform, and your ownership of the Causes you created, both remain intact.
12. Governing law
These IP terms are governed by the law of Queensland, Australia, and any dispute must be raised in a court seated in Queensland (Gold Coast or Brisbane), unless local consumer law grants you a stronger right elsewhere.
Contact
For any IP, copyright, trademark, or licensing question: press@be-cause.world.