Acceptable use

• Footage and photographs you shot or created yourself
• Output you generated in an AI tool, where the generator stamped its badge on your result
• Media you hold a licence to, where that licence permits you to remove or alter the mark
• A client’s material you have been engaged to work on, with their permission

• Stock photography or video previews, where the watermark exists precisely because you have not bought the licence
• Removing a photographer’s, illustrator’s or studio’s credit so the work can be reused as though it were unattributed
• Taking another creator’s social media post and republishing it as your own
• Stripping a provenance badge in order to pass AI-generated video off as real footage

The first two are not merely against our rules. In the United States, removing copyright management information — which a visible credit generally is — in order to conceal infringement is addressed by section 1202 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and carries statutory damages. Comparable provisions exist elsewhere.

• Sexually explicit or pornographic material of any kind
• Any image or video that sexualises, exploits or depicts the abuse of a minor
• Intimate images of anyone shared or made without their consent
• Material intended to harass, threaten, defame or impersonate a real person
• Altered images or video meant to defraud, such as edited documents, receipts or evidence
• Anything else that is illegal where you are

These apply whoever made the original file, including you. Paid features are not sold to anyone we have reason to believe is using the tool this way.

We remove visible badges only. We make no attempt to remove or interfere with invisible watermarks carried in the pixels, such as SynthID, and have no intention of building anything that does. Our tools export a newly encoded file, so metadata carried by the original, including C2PA records, is not copied into the result; the original file is never modified. Making AI output harder to identify is not a product we want to sell.

Honestly: mostly it is not, and we would rather say so than imply a monitoring capability we do not have. Your files never reach our servers, so we cannot inspect what you process — that is the same architectural choice that protects your privacy.

What we can do is decline to serve paid features to accounts we have reason to believe are being used for the second list above, and respond to rightsholder complaints about content hosted elsewhere. Beyond that, the responsibility for what you remove, and from whose work, is yours.

If you believe someone has used this tool to strip your credit from your work, write to legal@framecleaner.com. We cannot identify who processed what, but we can help where the material has been republished somewhere we have standing to act.