Terms of sale and use

1. What you are buying

You are buying a commemorative entry in a private registry, plus a certificate. Nobody can own time. This gives you no legal, property, or exclusive right to this minute, and it is not recognised by any government or official body. It is a keepsake.

A claim records one minute — a single UTC instant between 1900-01-01T00:00Z and 2099-12-31T23:59Z — against a name, a title and a note that you supply. It produces a signed certificate you can print. That is the entire product.

2. What you are not buying

You are not buying property, a trademark, an exclusive right, a licence, a share, or anything a court or a government would recognise as a claim over time. Nothing here appreciates, nothing here can be resold through us, and we make no representation that it will ever be worth anything to anyone but you.

We do not describe a certificate as verified ownership. There is no ownership to verify. The accurate phrase is verified registry entry, and it means precisely what /proof says it means.

3. One minute, one entry

A minute can carry one live entry at a time. Which entry that is, is settled by our database at the moment of purchase, not by who started filling in the form first. If two people pay for the same minute in the same second, exactly one succeeds and the other is refunded in full without being asked.

Entries are permanent, and in this version there is no transfer, no resale and no expiry. If a minute is released — through a refund, a moderation decision or a takedown — it returns to the pool and can be claimed by someone else.

4. Moderation

Nothing you write appears publicly before it has been through moderation. We may reject, redact or revoke an entry under the content policy, and we will tell you which ground we relied on. A rejected entry is refunded in full and the minute is released.

5. Age and capacity

You must be 18 or older to buy, or have the consent of a parent or guardian who agrees to these terms on your behalf.

6. Who sells you this

The registry is operated by:

• Irakli Mirotadze, trading as Own a Minute
• Besarion Jgenti St. 76
• Tbilisi 0186
• Georgia
• registry@ownminute.com — answered within 30 days

Purchases are made through Paddle.com Market Ltd as merchant of record. They are the seller for the purposes of your consumer contract and are responsible for VAT and sales tax in your jurisdiction, and your receipt comes from them. On a card statement the charge appears as PADDLE.NET* OWNAMINUTE — worth knowing before you decide you do not recognise it.

7. Refunds

Beyond your statutory rights we run a discretionary refund policy that is deliberately generous: wrong minute, wrong timezone, second thoughts, a duplicate, a gift that landed badly. Ask and we refund. The full position, including the EU and UK right of withdrawal, is at /refunds.

8. The wind-down commitment

We are selling permanence while running a business that might not outlast the minutes it records. So this is a commitment, not a hope, and it is part of these terms:

The full register — minute, name, title, note, serial and signature — is published as a downloadable dataset and refreshed monthly. The Ed25519 public key and every Merkle root are mirrored in a public repository outside our control. If this service ever shuts down, the final dataset stays published and every certificate stays verifiable against the published key by anyone, without us.

We will not remove that dataset or that key as part of any wind-down, sale or transfer of this business, and any successor takes it on the same terms.

9. Your content, and the licence you give us

You keep whatever rights you have in what you write. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish it on the minute's page, in the certificate, in the published dataset and in the Merkle roots — because a register that cannot publish its own entries is not a register. That licence survives your account being closed, subject to the erasure route in the privacy notice.

You confirm that what you write is yours to publish, and that where it names another living person you have a genuine connection to them and to the minute.

Everything that is not a registry entry — the site, its design, its typefaces as arranged here, the certificate layout, the code and the name Own a Minute — remains ours. © 2026 Own a Minute. You may quote and link freely, and the register's own data is published deliberately and openly at /proof/dataset for anyone to copy, check and keep.

If you believe something here infringes your copyright, write to registry@ownminute.com with the work, the entry and how to reach you. We take it down first and work it out afterwards — the same order as the takedown route.

10. Availability, and what we do not promise

We do not promise the site will be available without interruption. We do promise that an interruption never changes who holds a minute, and that the dataset and key commitments in section 8 apply regardless of whether the site is up.

11. Liability

Our liability to you for anything arising out of a purchase is limited to what you paid for it, except where the law does not permit that limit — for death, personal injury, fraud, or your non-excludable rights as a consumer, which are untouched by anything here.

12. Estates and inheritance

Transfers are disabled in this version, and that includes inheritance. We will nonetheless consider a written request from an executor case by case, and we would rather be asked than have someone assume the answer is no.

13. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for future purchases. What you agreed to at checkout is recorded with your order, word for word, and that is the version that governs your purchase — not whatever this page says later.

14. Law

Georgian law governs these terms. If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country, and you may bring proceedings there.