Terms of use

One

Who these terms are between

These terms are between you, the person using the application, and Nathan William Stokes, trading as SyphonDigital, ABN 39 706 235 960, of Western Australia. "Eternity" means the Windows application of that name, including its installer, the models bundled with it and any update to it. "We", "us" and "SyphonDigital" all mean that same person.

You accept these terms by installing or using Eternity. If you do not accept them, do not install it, or uninstall it if you already have. Uninstalling never removes your vault, which stays where it is and remains yours.

Two

The licence you have

SyphonDigital grants you a personal, non exclusive, non transferable licence to install and use Eternity on devices you own or control, free of charge, for as long as you keep to these terms.

What that covers

• Installing it on as many of your own machines as you want.
• Using it for yourself, for your family, or on behalf of somebody whose life you are recording.
• Everything the application produces. Your vault, your exports and your sealed packages are yours, and you may copy them, keep them and give them to whomever you choose. We claim nothing in them.

What it does not cover

• Selling, renting, sublicensing or redistributing the application, or bundling it into something else you supply.
• Passing it off as your own work, or removing or altering the marks that say whose it is.
• Modifying, decompiling, disassembling or reverse engineering it, except where law expressly allows that despite a term like this one. Where the law gives you such a right, this restriction does not remove it.
• Using it to do something unlawful, or to record a person in a way that is unlawful where you are.

Eternity is not open source. The source code is not published and no licence to it is given here. The application, its name, its design and its artwork remain the property of SyphonDigital. This licence is about using the software and nothing more.

Not everything in the installer is ours, and we do not claim it. The speech recognition, face detection, face grouping and colourisation models are the work of other people, redistributed here under their own licences: MIT, Apache 2.0 and BSD 2-Clause. Each of those licences permits what we are doing and requires that its copyright notice travel with the software, which is why a file named THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt sits beside the application after installation. The sentence above is about our own work. It is not a claim over theirs.

The licence ends if you stop keeping to these terms. If it ends, stop using the application and uninstall it. Your vault, your exports and your sealed packages are not affected: they are your records, not our software.

Three

What the application does with your data

Almost nothing, and the detail belongs on its own page rather than being summarised here. In short: there is no account and no server of ours, the vault is a file on your own computer, and the version downloaded from this site contacts at most two places. GitHub, to check whether there is a newer version. Anthropic, only if you choose to add your own API key so the companion can write fuller replies.

Both are set out plainly, including what each one reveals and how to avoid them, in the privacy notice. Read that page rather than trusting this paragraph, which is a pointer and not the statement itself.

Four

Your responsibility for your own records

This is the most consequential section on the page, so it is written plainly and not in legal language.

Your vault lives on your computer. We do not hold a copy of it. There is no account to log back into, no backup on our side, and no support process that can recover anything, because there is nothing at our end to recover it from. That is the whole design of the product, and it is also the risk of it.

• If the machine is lost, stolen, dropped or wiped and there is no copy elsewhere, the record is gone.
• If you turn on encryption, the key is generated for you and kept in a file beside the vault, which Windows encrypts so that only your Windows account can read it. There is no vault passphrase to remember and no way to be shown the key, so losing access to that Windows account normally means losing the vault with it. We cannot open it for you: we have never held the key. The privacy notice sets out exactly how the key is stored, including the one case where Windows cannot provide that protection.
• A sealed package is the one place you choose a passphrase, and it is not stored anywhere. Forget it and that package cannot be opened either, by you or by the person you made it for.
• If you seal a package and split its passphrase between several people, enough of those shares have to survive and be findable. Shares kept in one drawer are one drawer's worth of protection.

Somebody losing a parent's record because they assumed there was a copy somewhere would be the worst thing that could happen with this software. There is no copy somewhere. Make one.

Choosing what leaves the vault is also yours. Memories are private by default and a sealed package only carries what you have marked to go, so check the scope before you seal, and check who you are sending it to.

Five

What you record about other people

A record of a life is full of other people: their names, their photographs, their voices, things said about them that they never chose to publish. None of it comes to us, and none of it leaves your machine at all unless you have added your own Anthropic key. If you have, the text of a memory goes to Anthropic when you save it and again when you ask the companion something, and the text is exactly where other people's names sit. Photographs and recordings are never sent. The privacy notice sets out what goes and when. Either way, the application cannot decide on your behalf what is fair to record or fair to pass on.

You are responsible for what you put in and for who you give it to. Where it is practical, ask. Where somebody is recorded, be sure that recording them is lawful where you are. Before you seal a package for a particular person, look at what you are handing over, because a package is opened long after you can explain it.

Six

The companion is not a person

The companion is software that composes replies out of what is in the vault. It does not know the person. It is not them, and it is not speaking for them.

It is built to stay inside the record. It will not invent a memory, it will not claim to be the person, and "I never wrote anything down about that" is an answer it is required to give. Even so, it can be wrong. It can misread a date, join two things that were never connected, put weight where the person would not have, or quote a line without the context that made sense of it. With your own Anthropic key it phrases replies using a language model, and language models make mistakes.

Treat what it says as a reason to go and look at the record, not as the record. Do not rely on it as a statement of fact, and do not rely on it, or on anything else in the application, as legal, medical, financial or other professional advice. Nothing it says is advice from SyphonDigital.

The same caution applies to everything the application works out rather than stores: which faces belong to the same person, how significant a memory is, the tone of a conversation, how a faded photograph might once have looked. Those are guesses. They are labelled as guesses, they can be corrected, and the original is always kept beside them.

Seven

No warranty

Eternity is provided free of charge and as it is. We do not promise that it will be free of faults, that it will run on every machine, that a download will always be available, that a particular feature will still exist in a later version, or that it will suit any purpose you have in mind. You use it at your own risk.

To the extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties and conditions that are not written down here. Where the law gives you rights that cannot be excluded, those rights stand and nothing on this page tries to take them away. See governing law below.

Eight

Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, SyphonDigital is not liable for lost or damaged data, a vault that cannot be opened, a sealed package whose passphrase has been forgotten or that never reached the person it was meant for, lost profits, or any indirect or consequential loss arising out of your use of Eternity or your inability to use it.

If we are held liable despite that, and the law allows a cap, our total liability to you is limited to the amount you paid for the application. That amount is nothing. The line is blunt and it is honest: this is free software from a small studio, given away rather than sold, and section four matters far more to you than this one does.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Nine

Updates

The version downloaded from this site checks GitHub for a newer version when it starts and every six hours after that. If there is one it is downloaded in the background and applied the next time you quit, and there is no setting in this build to turn that off. The privacy notice says what the check reveals and how to stop it at the firewall.

Updates can change how the application works, and features can be added, altered or removed. The vault format only ever moves forward: a newer version opens an older vault and upgrades it. Going back to an older version afterwards may not work. Eternity takes a backup of the vault every time it starts, so there is always a recent copy to fall back to, and taking one of your own as well does no harm.

Ten

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms, usually because the application has gained something that needs describing. The date at the top of the page says when they last changed, and the current version always lives at this address. Anything significant will be mentioned in the release notes for the version it arrives with.

Carrying on using Eternity after a change means the new terms apply to you. If you do not accept them, uninstall the application. Your vault stays on your machine and remains yours either way.

Eleven

Governing law

SyphonDigital is based in Western Australia. These terms are governed by the law of Western Australia, and the courts of Western Australia have jurisdiction over any dispute about them. If you are a consumer somewhere else, you may also have rights under the law of the place you live, and this clause does not take those away.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right or remedy under the Australian Consumer Law that cannot be excluded, restricted or modified. Where a consumer guarantee applies and we are permitted to limit our liability for failing it, our liability is limited to supplying the software again.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of them continue to apply.

Twelve

Contact

Questions about these terms, about the licence, or about anything on this page: support@syphondigital.online.

For what the application does with your data, and the two places it ever connects to, see the privacy notice.