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Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and Where's The Fish for using the website, your account, the Catchbook and Premium. Please read them: by creating an account or subscribing you agree to them.

Draft: this document is being reviewed and is not yet in effect.

1. About these terms

Where's The Fish ("we", "us", "our") runs the website at wheresthefish.us and everything you can do on it: the map and spot pages, the forecasts and tide data, the trip planner, the Catchbook, angler profiles, trip reports, comments and the Premium subscription (together, "the service").

These terms apply to everyone who uses the service, whether or not they have an account. Some parts only apply once you sign in or subscribe, and we say so where that is the case. Our Privacy Policy explains how we use your personal information and forms part of these terms.

Nothing in these terms takes away any right you have under the consumer protection laws of the state where you live that cannot be waived by agreement.

2. Your account

You need an account to save spots, plan trips, log catches, write up sessions, comment or subscribe to Premium. Signing in is passwordless: you use your Google account or a secure sign-in link (and code) that we email to you. Each link works once and expires after a short time.

  • You must be at least 16 years old to create an account.
  • You must give us a working email address that belongs to you and keep it up to date.
  • Your account is personal to you. Do not share sign-in links or let anyone else use your account, and tell us right away if you think someone has.
  • You may hold one account. Your angler username is chosen once and cannot be changed afterwards, so choose carefully.
  • You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including content posted and subscriptions started, unless it results from our failure to keep the service secure.

3. Free use and Premium

Most of the service is free: browsing every spot, county and state page, the short-range forecast, saving spots, logging as many catches as you like, writing up sessions and publishing reports. Some features are limited on the free tier and unlimited (or expanded) with a Premium subscription. The current comparison is always on the Premium page. At the date of these terms:

  • A free account can use the trip planner as often as it likes, but only for the current day. A plan for any other day shows its rating and conditions; the exact window, arrival time and method for that day are part of Premium.
  • Photo species identification is limited to 5 identifications per calendar month on a free account and 50 on Premium. An identification only counts when we actually run the model on your photo. When the limit is reached you can still log the catch by choosing the species yourself.
  • Premium adds the full seven-day forecast calendar, trip plans for any day of that week with a backup window for every plan, the tide curve on other anglers' reports, and extra privacy controls for your catches and profile.

We may change which features are free and which are Premium, and the allowances on each tier. If a change would take something away from a paid subscription you already hold, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before it takes effect.

4. Subscriptions, automatic renewal and cancellation

Premium is a monthly subscription, currently $4.99 a month. Prices are in US dollars. Where we are required to collect sales tax, it is added at checkout, and the total you will pay is shown on the Stripe checkout page before you confirm.

Automatic renewal

Your subscription renews automatically every month, and we will charge the payment method you gave Stripe the then-current monthly price on each renewal date, until you cancel. You can cancel online at any time, as described below. We will tell you by email before any price increase takes effect.

Payment

  • Payment is taken by our payment provider, Stripe. We never see or store your full card details; Stripe does that under its own terms and privacy policy.
  • Your subscription starts as soon as your first payment succeeds and renews on the same date each month.
  • If a renewal payment fails we will tell you and Stripe will retry. If it keeps failing, Premium access ends and your account returns to the free tier. Nothing you logged is lost.
  • The price you pay stays the same for as long as you keep your subscription unless we tell you otherwise. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email of any price increase, and you can cancel before it applies.

Cancelling

  • You can cancel at any time from your account page, which opens the Stripe billing portal. Cancelling stops the next renewal; you keep Premium until the end of the period you have already paid for, and nothing further is charged.
  • Payments are non-refundable, including for partly used months, except where the law requires a refund or the service was unavailable for a significant part of the period because of a fault on our side.

Ending a subscription

We may end your subscription if you breach these terms, or on 30 days' notice if we stop offering Premium. If we end it for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund the unused part of the month.

5. Content you upload

"Your content" means anything you add to the service: catch records and photos, trip plans and reports, session write-ups, comments and replies, your profile, username, bio and avatar, forecast feedback, and anything you send us through the contact form.

What you promise about it

  • You own your content or have the right to post it. If a photo shows someone other than you, you have their permission to publish it. If it shows a child, you are that child's parent or guardian or have the parent's permission.
  • It is accurate to the best of your knowledge. Do not log catches you did not make or claim weights you did not record.
  • It does not break the law, infringe anyone's rights, or contain anything listed under acceptable use below.
  • It does not contain personal information about other people beyond what they would reasonably expect from a fishing photo taken in a public place.

Who can see it

Catches, reports and profiles are public by default so that other anglers can learn from them, and they appear on the spot, county and state pages, in the community catches feed, on your profile and in search engines. Before you post you can choose how precisely the location is shown. Some audience and location options are part of Premium; the options you already hold are never taken away if your subscription lapses. Content marked private or link-only is not shown publicly, but anyone you give a link to can see link-only content.

Photos and metadata

When you upload a photo we read its embedded metadata (the time it was taken and, if present, the GPS position) to pre-fill the catch, then re-encode the image so that metadata is removed from the copy we store and publish. You can turn metadata reading off in your profile settings. Photo species identification sends the photo, and nothing that identifies you, to a third-party AI provider to suggest a species; the suggestion is only a suggestion and you decide what to record.

Moderation

We do not review content before it is published, but we may hide, change the visibility of, or remove any content that we reasonably believe breaks these terms or the law, or that exposes us or other users to risk. Hidden content stays visible to you with the reason shown, and you can email us if you think we have got it wrong.

6. Our rights to your content

You keep ownership of your content, and the copyright in your photos stays yours. So that we can run the service you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to:

  • store, back up, copy, resize, crop, compress and reformat your content so it can be delivered on any screen;
  • display and distribute the content you have made public through the service, including on spot, area, species and profile pages, in feeds, notifications, emails to other users and shared links, and in the structured data that search engines read;
  • use public content, with your username, to promote the service, for example in a "recent catches" strip on the home page, in screenshots, in our social media posts or in a newsletter. We will not sell your photos or license them to other companies for their own use;
  • combine your catch records with everyone else's to produce aggregated, de-identified statistics such as which species are caught at a spot and when. These aggregates do not identify you.

The license lasts as long as the content is on the service. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except that copies may remain in backups for a limited period (see section 10), aggregated statistics already produced remain, and content that other people have shared, quoted or screenshotted is outside our control. Anything you sent us as feedback or a suggestion we may use without any obligation to you.

Other users may view your public content on the service, but these terms do not give them the right to copy or republish it elsewhere without your permission.

7. Acceptable use

You must not use the service, or post content, to:

  • break any law, including fishing regulations, license requirements, size, slot and bag limits and closed seasons, or encourage others to;
  • harass, threaten, abuse or defame anyone, or post anything obscene, hateful or discriminatory;
  • impersonate another person or misrepresent who you are or your connection to us;
  • post spam, advertising, affiliate links or anything you have been paid to post without saying so;
  • upload malware, or try to gain access to accounts, systems or data you are not entitled to;
  • scrape, crawl or bulk-download the service other than as a search engine indexing public pages, or use the forecasts, spot data or catch data to build a competing product or dataset;
  • reverse-engineer, interfere with or overload the service, or get around any limit, gate or paywall;
  • trespass, or direct others to spots on private property or in closed or restricted areas.

You are responsible for fishing legally, including holding any license or permit the state requires, and for checking access rights, private property and local restrictions before you go. A spot appearing on the service does not mean you have permission to fish it.

8. Our content and AI-generated content

Everything on the service that is not your or another user's content — the spot, county, state and species guides, the bait and rig information, the illustrations, the design, code, forecast scoring and the name and logo — belongs to us or our licensors and is protected by copyright and other rights.

You may view it, print it and share links to it for your own, non-commercial use. You may not copy it in bulk, republish it, sell it or use it to train a machine-learning model without our written permission.

Much of the written guidance and many of the species illustrations are generated with the help of artificial intelligence and then reviewed by us. It is offered as general information and can contain mistakes. We never state size, slot, bag or season limits: always check the current rules from the state wildlife agency, tide predictions and local advice from an official source before you rely on anything here.

9. Forecasts, tides and safety

Weather, sea and tide data come from third-party providers and our own scoring is an automated estimate of how good conditions are likely to be for fishing. It is not a safety forecast. It can be wrong, late, incomplete or missing for a particular spot, and conditions on the shore can differ from any forecast.

Fishing from the shore, piers, bridges and jetties can be dangerous: lightning, rip currents, strong tidal currents, heat and slippery rocks among other things. You are solely responsible for deciding whether to go, where to stand and when to leave, and for your own safety and equipment. Please read our fishing safety guide. Nothing on the service is a substitute for official tide predictions, National Weather Service watches and warnings, Coast Guard advice or your own judgment on the day.

10. Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time from the account page. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. When you delete your account:

  • any active Premium subscription is canceled at once and you will not be charged again. The remaining part of the current month is not refunded, so if you want to use it, cancel the subscription first and delete the account when it ends;
  • your profile, catches, photos, trips, reports, comments, likes, saved spots, notifications and settings are deleted from the live service, and your public pages stop resolving. Comments other people left on your content are removed with it. Replies you left on other people's content are removed too;
  • copies may persist in our backups for up to 30 days before they are overwritten, and photo files are purged from our storage within the same period;
  • aggregated, de-identified statistics that your catches contributed to (for example species counts at a spot) are kept, because they no longer identify you;
  • we keep records we are legally required to keep, such as payment and invoice records held by Stripe for tax purposes, and a minimal record needed to enforce a ban if the account was closed for breaking these terms.

If you only want to remove something specific, you can delete individual catches, trips, reports and comments, or make them private, without deleting the account.

11. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close your account, remove content, or limit features if you seriously or repeatedly breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if your use puts other users or the service at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so we will tell you why and give you a chance to put things right. Section 10 applies to what happens to your content when an account is closed.

You can stop using the service at any time. If you stop signing in, your account and content remain until you delete them, and we may email you about your saved spots only if you have alerts turned on.

12. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

We provide the service with reasonable care and skill, but it is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and we do not promise the service will always be available, error-free or up to date. We are not responsible for content posted by other users.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, for any loss of profits, data or opportunity, or for loss or damage arising from your reliance on a forecast, score, guide or other information on the service. Our total liability to you for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of $50 and the amount you paid us in that period.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages, so some of the above may not apply to you. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, such as liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence.

13. Your responsibility to us

If a third party brings a claim against us because of content you posted or your breach of these terms or the law, you agree to cover the reasonable costs, damages and legal fees that result, to the extent the law allows. We will tell you about the claim and let you help respond to it.

We respect copyright. If you believe content on the service infringes a copyright you own or represent, email [email protected] with the URL of the content, a description of the work, your contact details, a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized, and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner, with your physical or electronic signature. We will remove content that we find infringes and, in appropriate cases, close the accounts of repeat infringers.

15. Changes to the service and these terms

We keep adding to, changing and occasionally removing features. We may update these terms to reflect that, to comply with the law, or to make them clearer. If a change is material we will tell you by email or with a notice on the site at least 14 days before it applies (30 days for anything that affects a paid subscription). If you keep using the service after the change takes effect you accept the new terms; if you do not agree, you can cancel and delete your account before then.

16. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, where Where's The Fish is based, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you use the service as a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of the state where you live, and you may bring a claim in the courts where you live.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms, a billing question, a moderation decision or a takedown request can be sent to [email protected] or through the contact page.