Terms of Service
1. Who can use Plumage
You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age in your country) and able to form a binding contract. You're responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your login secure.
2. Your account
You agree to provide accurate information and to keep it current. You may delete your account at any time from Edit Profile → Delete Account, which permanently removes your profile, photos, and stored photo files.
3. Your content
You own your photos. Plumage doesn't claim ownership of the photos, captions, or other content you post (“Your Content”).
License to operate the app. To run Plumage, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, resize, and display Your Content solely to provide and improve the service — for example, showing your photos in the communal feed, search, map, and on your profile to other users, and generating thumbnails. This license ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in routine backups for a limited time and content others have lawfully saved within the app. We do not license Your Content for advertising and we do not sell it.
You are responsible for what you post. You represent that you own or have the rights to Your Content and that it doesn't infringe anyone's rights or break the law.
4. Acceptable use
Plumage is a calm, respectful community for bird photographers. Don't:
- post content that is unlawful, infringing, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, or violent;
- impersonate others or misrepresent who took a photo;
- harass, threaten, or abuse other birders;
- disclose precise locations of sensitive or endangered birds in a way that could cause them harm (use the location-precision controls);
- attempt to break, overload, scrape, or reverse-engineer the service, or circumvent security or access controls.
5. Safety, blocking, and content moderation
- Blocking. You can block another user; you'll stop seeing their content and they can't comment on or like your photos.
- Removal of content. To keep the community safe, we (as administrators) may remove content or restrict or terminate accounts that violate these Terms. Regular users cannot remove or take down another user's photo; content removal is performed only by Plumage administrators. If your photo is removed, you'll receive a notice in the app.
- We may act on content that violates these Terms, but we are not obligated to monitor everything posted.
6. Purchases: supporter gifts and memberships
Everything in Plumage is free. You can optionally support Plumage with a one-time supporter gift, sold through the Apple App Store. A gift is a one-time consumable purchase: it unlocks nothing, does not renew, and is not a subscription. The gift amounts and prices are shown on the in-app purchase screen before you buy, in your local currency as set by the App Store.
If we offer paid memberships (including auto-renewable subscriptions or a one-time lifetime purchase) in the future, the following applies to subscriptions:
- Titles and pricing. The membership names, durations, and prices (including any free trial) are shown on the in-app purchase screen before you buy.
- Billing. Payment is charged to your Apple ID at confirmation of purchase.
- Auto-renewal. A subscription automatically renews for the same period at the then-current price unless you turn off auto-renew at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Your Apple ID is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the period ends.
- Free trial. If a plan includes a free trial, any unused portion is forfeited when you purchase a subscription, where applicable.
- Managing and canceling. You manage or cancel a subscription in your App Store account settings after purchase. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription.
Refunds. All purchases are handled by Apple; refunds are subject to Apple's policies. Contact Apple for billing and refund requests.
7. Intellectual property and third-party data
Plumage, its name, logo, design, and software are owned by us and protected by law. These Terms don't grant you any right to our trademarks or software except to use the app as intended.
Plumage also displays openly licensed third-party data and media — for example, species occurrence data from GBIF (including the eBird Observation Dataset), bird-song recordings from Xeno-canto (owned by their recordists), and the AviList species checklist. That material remains under its own licenses and belongs to its respective owners; attributions appear in the app under Edit Profile → About → Open data & thanks and where the material is shown.
8. Disclaimers
The service is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that species identifications, occurrence data, or place names are accurate.
9. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Plumage and its operator will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or loss of data, profits, or goodwill. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim or USD $50.
10. Termination
You may stop using Plumage and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms or to protect the service or other users. Sections that by their nature should survive (content license for existing lawful copies, disclaimers, liability limits, and dispute terms) survive termination.
11. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. We'll revise the effective date and, for material changes, notify you in the app or by email. Continuing to use Plumage after changes means you accept them.
12. Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute relating to these Terms or the service will be brought in the state or federal courts located in New York, and you consent to their jurisdiction.
13. Contact
Apple's standard EULA (Licensed Application End User License Agreement) also applies to apps downloaded from the App Store.