Acceptable Use

1. What we host, and what we only point at

The rule the whole product is built on: Latch & Lantern stores what your family made or bought, and embeds everything else.

So the Music card holds your own files — the ripped CD shelf, the school concert, your grandfather singing — because those have no address anywhere else to point at. Video Clips holds the thirty seconds you shot on your phone. Photographs are yours. Everything from the commercial world — a Spotify playlist, a YouTube video, an internet radio station, a podcast episode — is an address we keep and your browser loads from the company that owns it. None of it is copied onto our disk.

2. What you may upload

You may upload music, video and images that you own, or that you have the right to keep for your own household’s private use. The intended cases are exactly what they sound like:

• An album you bought, ripped from your own CD or downloaded from a store, played by your own family in your own house.
• Recordings your family made — the school play, the wedding speech, the voicemail nobody wants to lose.
• Photographs and clips you took, or that were given to you.
• Anything out of copyright, or licensed in a way that permits it.

You may not upload a film, album or television series you do not have the right to keep, however you came by it, and you may not use a hub as somewhere to park a library for other people to pull from. Copyright law in your country decides what private household use means; we are not in a position to decide it for you, and we are not offering you a licence to anything.

A hub is not a distribution service, and kin sends are the test of it. Sending a track to your sister’s hub makes one copy in one household you chose — the digital equivalent of handing her a disc. That is within the spirit of this page. Systematically pushing a music library into a dozen linked hubs, or recruiting linked families to build a shared library, is not, and we will treat it as distribution however it is technically done.

Storage is capped for the same reason it is priced: 20 GB with the hub, 40 MB a song, 2 GB of music, 150 MB a clip, 4 GB of clips. Those numbers fit a family’s shelf. They do not fit an archive, and that is deliberate.

3. What must never go in a hub

• Material that sexually exploits or abuses a child. This is the one rule with no process attached. A hub found to hold it is closed on the spot, without notice, and reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and to law enforcement. There is no appeal, no warning and no second chance.
• Anything else illegal where you are or where the server is — stolen data, credentials, fraud material, instructions for making weapons intended to hurt people.
• Harassment, threats, stalking or intimate images shared without the consent of the person in them — and this applies inside a family as much as outside one. A hub must not be used to frighten, control or humiliate a member of it. If that is happening to you, write to us.
• Malware, or anything designed to attack a person or a machine.
• Impersonating somebody, or using a hub to deceive people about who they are talking to.
• Attacking the service itself — probing other families’ data, trying to get around the isolation, scraping, flooding it, or pointing it at networks it should not reach. If you are looking for a vulnerability in good faith, there is a welcome for that on Security; this bullet is about everything else.

4. Links and embeds are theirs, not ours

When somebody in your family saves a YouTube video, a Spotify playlist, an Apple Music album, a SoundCloud set, a Bandcamp record, a radio station or a podcast, what is stored here is the address. Press play and your browser fetches it from that company’s servers. Nothing is copied to our disk.

That has consequences worth being plain about:

• We do not host it, choose it, check it or endorse it. A card is a window onto someone else’s service.
• It plays under their terms and their privacy policy, not ours — including whatever advertising, account requirement or regional restriction they apply. Nothing loads from any of them until a member clicks play; see Privacy.
• It can vanish. A video taken down, a playlist made private, a station that changes address — the card goes blank and there is nothing we can do about it.
• It must still be legal to link to. Do not use the link cards to point at pirated streams or anything from section 3.
• The browser will only frame six named hosts. A link to anywhere else — a TikTok, an Instagram reel — is kept as a plain link and opens on that site, which is also why we could not embed it even if we wanted to.

5. Copyright complaints

If you own a copyright and believe your work is stored in a hub here without permission, tell us and we will act on it. We do not require a court order and we do not argue with rights holders about whether a household’s shelf is fair use; we take it down and tell the family why.

Send a notice to the address in Questions, and include:

1. Your name, your postal address, your telephone number and your email address.
2. Identification of the work you say has been infringed — the album, track, film or image.
3. Enough detail for us to find the material: the family address (name.latchandlantern.com) and whatever else you can give us about what it is and where it appeared. We cannot browse a family’s hub looking for it, so specifics matter.
4. A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law.
5. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and — under penalty of perjury — that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner.
6. Your physical or electronic signature.

We will remove or disable the material, notify the hub owner and pass on your notice. If they believe it was a mistake they can send us a counter-notice with their own contact details, a statement under penalty of perjury that the removal was a mistake or a misidentification, and their consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court where they live (or, if outside the United States, the District of Wyoming). We will forward it to you, and may restore the material after ten business days unless you tell us you have gone to court.

Repeat infringement ends a hub. A family that keeps receiving valid notices has their hub closed, in line with the repeat-infringer policy the law expects of us.

Please do not send a notice about something you do not own, or about material you know is licensed. Misrepresenting a notice carries its own liability under section 512(f) of the DMCA.

6. How we enforce this

We do not scan your content. There is no automated inspection of your family’s photographs, messages or music, no fingerprinting, no classifier, and no AI reading any of it. We built the product so that we cannot browse a family’s hub from the operator console at all. So the only way we learn about a problem is that somebody tells us.

When somebody does, we look at what we have been told, ask the hub owner about it where that is safe and sensible, and then do the least drastic thing that fixes it: remove the specific material, or suspend the account that posted it, or close the hub. The exceptions to “ask first” are the ones you would expect — child sexual abuse material, an active threat to somebody’s safety, or a legal order — where we act immediately.

If we close a hub for a breach, we will tell the owner what the breach was. If you think we got it wrong, reply and say so; a person reads it.

To report something, write to the address below. Tell us the family address if you know it, what you saw, and how you saw it. Reports about a child’s safety go to the top of the pile.

Questions

Latch & Lantern is operated by The DAS Board LLC. Copyright notices, abuse reports and questions about this page all go to [email protected], which reaches a person.

Honest note. This page has not been reviewed by a lawyer. It was written by the person who built the product, to say clearly what may go in a hub and what happens if something should not have. It is not legal advice, and nothing on it tells you whether a particular use of a particular recording is lawful where you live — for that, ask someone qualified.