Intellectual property and confidentiality

This is the page that matters most to anyone thinking of uploading an idea, so it is written as plainly as we can manage.

Your idea stays yours

App444 does not claim ownership of your idea, your business, your content or your intellectual property. Submitting a project here does not transfer anything to us and does not give us equity in anything you build.

We need a limited licence to operate the platform — to store your content, display it to the people you have chosen to show it to, and process it to produce your plan and summary. That licence exists only to run the service and ends when you delete your content.

What we do to protect your confidential detail

• Every project starts private. Nothing is public until you choose to make it public.
• Block 12 gives you a confidential box. What you put there is stored separately from the rest of your project.
• Confidential detail is never published, and never included in any summary, plan or listing.
• Confidential detail is never sent to the AI. It is removed in code before anything is sent, so even a badly written prompt cannot leak it.
• The public version of your project is a safe summary designed to explain what the idea is without explaining how to rebuild it.

What we cannot protect you from

Once a person can read a description of your idea, they know the idea. No technical setting changes that. We cannot promise:

• That nobody who reads your public summary will act on it
• That another person will not independently have the same idea
• That a user will honour an agreement they made with you
• That your intellectual property is protected in any legal sense
• That confidentiality will be maintained by other users

App444 does not guarantee intellectual property protection or confidentiality protection. It is stated in the disclaimer as well, because it is important enough to say twice.

What you should actually do

If your idea genuinely has protectable value, treat this platform as one part of a plan, not the plan:

• Put the truly critical detail in the confidential box, and nowhere else.
• Talk to an intellectual property lawyer about whether a patent, trade mark or design registration applies to you.
• Use a written NDA before sharing confidential detail with an individual, in addition to anything App444 does.
• Get an agreement in place with contributors covering IP ownership before work starts, not after.
• Keep dated records of what you created and when.

Ideas are not protectable — execution is

In Australia, as in most places, an idea by itself generally cannot be owned. What can be protected is a specific expression, invention, brand or design. This is worth understanding before you decide how much secrecy your idea actually needs.

It is also the reason App444 works the way it does: for most projects, the risk of nobody ever hearing the idea is far larger than the risk of somebody stealing it.

Content belonging to other people

Do not upload material you do not have the right to use. If you believe something on App444 infringes your rights, contact us and we will investigate.