Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of Meridia, including our website, applications, APIs, and related services (collectively, the "Service"). "Meridia," "we," "us," and "our" refer to the operators of the Service. By accessing or using the Service, creating an account, or clicking "I agree," you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

PLEASE READ SECTION 14 (DISPUTE RESOLUTION; BINDING ARBITRATION; CLASS-ACTION WAIVER) CAREFULLY. IT REQUIRES YOU TO RESOLVE DISPUTES WITH MERIDIA ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS THROUGH BINDING ARBITRATION AND LIMITS THE REMEDIES OTHERWISE AVAILABLE TO YOU.

1. Eligibility and Accounts

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a legally binding contract to use the Service. You agree to provide accurate information when creating an account, to keep your credentials secure, and to take responsibility for all activity that occurs under your account. We may refuse, suspend, or terminate access at any time, in our sole discretion, with or without notice.

2. The Service

The Service currently provides content, tools, and information for discovering fishing destinations, waters, species, lodges, guides, and conditions. The Service is provided for informational and personal use. Features that may be added in the future — including reservations, payments, listings by third-party operators, or other transactional features — will be governed by additional or updated terms presented at the time those features are offered. Nothing on the Service constitutes professional advice (legal, navigational, medical, or otherwise).

3. Inherent Risks and Assumption of Risk

Fishing, boating, wading, hiking, and other outdoor recreation activities involve inherent and substantial risks of personal injury, illness, property damage, and death, including risks from weather, water conditions, wildlife, equipment failure, third-party conduct, remote locations, and your own decisions and physical condition. You knowingly and voluntarily assume all such risks when participating in any activity informed by or facilitated through the Service. You are solely responsible for complying with all applicable fishing, boating, and environmental laws and regulations, including license and permit requirements, season dates, bag limits, gear restrictions, and access rules.

4. User Content

"User Content" means any content you submit, post, upload, or otherwise make available through the Service, including reviews, photographs, videos, comments, ratings, trip reports, and messages. You retain ownership of your User Content. You grant Meridia and its affiliates a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid-up, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, and sublicensable license to host, store, cache, reproduce, publish, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, translate, modify (for formatting, cropping, resizing, and similar purposes), create derivative works of, and otherwise use your User Content in connection with operating, providing, marketing, and improving the Service and Meridia's business, in any medium now known or later developed.

You waive, to the maximum extent permitted by law, any moral rights or rights of publicity you may have in your User Content in connection with Meridia's use as permitted above. You represent and warrant that (a) you own or have the rights necessary to grant this license, (b) your User Content does not infringe or violate any third-party rights, and (c) your User Content complies with these Terms and applicable law. We may, but are not obligated to, review, screen, edit, or remove User Content. We may retain backup or archival copies of removed content for our legal and operational purposes.

If you provide suggestions, ideas, or feedback about the Service ("Feedback"), you grant Meridia an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use the Feedback for any purpose without compensation or attribution.

5. Acceptable Use and Prohibited Conduct

You agree not to, and will not attempt to:

• Violate any law, regulation, or third-party right.
• Impersonate any person or entity or misrepresent your affiliation with any person or entity.
• Post or transmit content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, obscene, fraudulent, deceptive, or infringing.
• Scrape, crawl, index, harvest, spider, or extract data from the Service by any automated or manual means, except as expressly permitted by our published robots.txt or with our prior written consent.
• Use bots, scripts, scrapers, headless browsers, or other automated tools to access, monitor, or interact with the Service.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to derive source code or underlying ideas from the Service.
• Use the Service or any data, output, or content from it to build, train, fine-tune, evaluate, benchmark, or improve any machine-learning model, dataset, or competing product. See Section 7.
• Bypass, disable, or circumvent any security, rate-limit, access-control, or technological measure of the Service.
• Remove, alter, or obscure any copyright, trademark, or proprietary-rights notice.
• Resell, sublicense, rent, lease, or otherwise commercialize the Service or any content from it.
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service except through a coordinated disclosure process we authorize in writing.
• Use the Service to compete with Meridia or to develop a product or service substantially similar to it.

Violations may result in immediate suspension or termination of your access, removal of content, and pursuit of all available legal and equitable remedies, including damages and injunctive relief.

6. Intellectual Property

The Service, including all software, code, designs, user interfaces, graphics, text, photographs (other than User Content), videos, illustrations, logos, names, icons, audio, data, compilations, classifications, taxonomies, scoring methodologies, editorial selections, fish-species and water-body groupings, conditions algorithms, AI-generated content produced by us, and the "look and feel" of the Service (collectively, the "Meridia Materials"), is owned by Meridia or its licensors and is protected by United States and international copyright, trademark, trade secret, database, and other intellectual- property laws.

Compilation and Database Rights. Even where individual facts or data points are not themselves protectable, Meridia's selection, coordination, arrangement, curation, enrichment, classification, and presentation of those facts constitute protected compilations and databases. You may not extract, re-use, or systematically copy a substantial part of the Meridia Materials, whether evaluated quantitatively or qualitatively, without our prior written consent. To the extent permitted by law, Meridia asserts sui generis database rights in its compilations.

Trademarks. "Meridia," the Meridia logo, and all related names, marks, and slogans are trademarks of Meridia. You may not use any Meridia trademark without our prior written permission.

Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and use the Service for your own personal, non-commercial purposes. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

7. AI Training, Text-and-Data Mining, and Automated Use

Meridia expressly reserves all rights in the Meridia Materials and the Service in respect of any text-and-data mining and any training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or improvement of artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models (including large language models, embedding models, image-generation models, and recommendation systems). This is an express reservation of rights under Article 4(3) of EU Directive 2019/790 (the CDSM Directive) and any analogous provision in any jurisdiction. Any use of the Meridia Materials for such purposes — including scraping or downloading the Service to assemble or augment a training corpus — is prohibited without our prior written license.

For clarity, Meridia and its affiliates may use the Meridia Materials and User Content (under the license you grant in Section 4) to develop, train, evaluate, and improve Meridia's own artificial-intelligence and machine-learning features.

8. Copyright Complaints

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, contact us at hello@meridiaoutdoors.com with the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3) (the DMCA), including identification of the work, the allegedly infringing material, your contact information, a good-faith statement, and a statement under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act. We will respond in a manner consistent with the DMCA and may terminate the access of repeat infringers. Misrepresentations in a notice may subject you to liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

9. Third-Party Content and Services

The Service may include data, content, or links provided by third parties (including weather, river-gauge, tide, map, and regulatory sources) and links to third-party websites and services. We do not control and are not responsible for third-party content or services, and inclusion does not imply endorsement. Your use of third-party services is at your own risk and subject to their terms.

10. Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT, DATA, AND MATERIALS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE. Meridia and its affiliates, suppliers, and licensors disclaim all warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranties arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

Without limiting the foregoing, we do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or free of harmful components, or that any information (including fishing forecasts, river or tide data, regulations, maps, hatch timing, or AI-generated interpretations) is accurate, complete, current, or suitable for any purpose. Conditions and regulatory information is informational only and must not be used as the sole basis for navigation, safety, regulatory compliance, or other consequential decisions. Verify directly with authoritative sources (NOAA, USGS, your state wildlife agency) before acting.

11. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL MERIDIA OR ITS AFFILIATES, OPERATORS, AGENTS, SUPPLIERS, OR LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUES, DATA, GOODWILL, USE, ENJOYMENT, OR ALTERNATIVE ARRANGEMENTS, WHETHER INCURRED DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, OR ANY DAMAGES FOR PERSONAL INJURY, PROPERTY DAMAGE, LOSS OF EQUIPMENT, OR ACTS OR OMISSIONS OF THIRD PARTIES, ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS OR YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

IN ALL CASES, MERIDIA'S AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100). These limitations apply regardless of the form of action and survive any failure of essential purpose of any limited remedy. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages; in those jurisdictions our liability is limited to the greatest extent permitted.

12. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Meridia and its affiliates, operators, agents, suppliers, and licensors from and against any and all claims, demands, actions, liabilities, losses, damages, judgments, settlements, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees and costs) arising out of or related to: (a) your access to or use of the Service; (b) your User Content; (c) your violation of these Terms or any applicable law; (d) your interactions with any other user; and (e) your participation in any outdoor or recreational activity informed by the Service.

13. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to all or part of the Service at any time, with or without notice and with or without cause. You may stop using the Service at any time. The sections that by their nature should survive termination — including intellectual-property, disclaimer, limitation of liability, indemnification, dispute resolution, and miscellaneous — will survive.

14. Dispute Resolution; Binding Arbitration; Class-Action Waiver

Please read this Section carefully. It affects your legal rights. This Section is governed by the Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. § 1 et seq.

14.1 Informal Resolution

Before filing any claim, you and Meridia agree to attempt to resolve the dispute informally by sending a written notice describing the dispute and requested relief to hello@meridiaoutdoors.com. The parties will negotiate in good faith for at least sixty (60) days before commencing arbitration.

14.2 Binding Arbitration

Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, whether based in contract, tort, statute, fraud, misrepresentation, or any other legal theory, and whether arising before or after termination of these Terms, will be resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association ("AAA") under its Consumer Arbitration Rules then in effect. The arbitration will be conducted by a single arbitrator. The arbitration may proceed by telephone, video, or written submissions, or in person at a location determined under the AAA rules. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

14.3 Class-Action and Jury-Trial Waiver

YOU AND MERIDIA AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS, COLLECTIVE, REPRESENTATIVE, OR CONSOLIDATED PROCEEDING. THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE OR JOIN MORE THAN ONE PERSON'S CLAIMS AND MAY NOT PRESIDE OVER ANY FORM OF CLASS, COLLECTIVE, OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. YOU AND MERIDIA EACH WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL BY JURY. If a court decides that this class-action waiver is unenforceable with respect to any claim, then that claim (and only that claim) will be severed from the arbitration and may proceed in court, and all other claims will continue to be arbitrated.

14.4 Exceptions

Notwithstanding the foregoing, either party may (a) bring an individual action in small-claims court for claims that qualify; and (b) seek injunctive or other equitable relief in court to protect its intellectual-property rights, trade secrets, or confidentiality.

15. Governing Law

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to them are governed by the laws of the United States and, to the extent federal law does not apply, by the laws of the state in which Meridia is principally operated, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

16. Time Limit for Claims

Any claim against Meridia arising out of or related to these Terms or the Service must be commenced within one (1) year after the cause of action accrues or be permanently barred, except where applicable law prohibits contractual shortening of the limitations period.

17. Force Majeure

Meridia will not be liable for any delay or failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disasters, weather, fire, flood, earthquake, war, terrorism, civil unrest, labor disputes, government action, epidemics or pandemics, internet or utility outages, or failures of third-party providers.

18. Notices and Electronic Communications

You consent to receive electronic communications from Meridia, including by email, in-product notice, or posting on the Service, and you agree that all electronic notices satisfy any legal requirement that such communications be in writing. We may give notice by emailing the address associated with your account or by posting on the Service; notice is effective when sent or posted. You may give us notice at hello@meridiaoutdoors.com.

19. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes we will provide reasonable notice (for example, by email or in-product notice) before the changes take effect. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.

20. Miscellaneous

Entire Agreement. These Terms, together with any policies incorporated by reference (including our Privacy Policy), are the entire agreement between you and Meridia regarding the Service and supersede any prior or contemporaneous agreements on the subject. Severability. If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the remaining provisions will remain in full force. No Waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver. Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our prior written consent; we may assign them freely, including in connection with a transfer of the Service. No Agency. Nothing in these Terms creates any agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship. Export and Sanctions. You represent that you are not located in, and will not use the Service from, any jurisdiction subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions, and that you are not on any U.S. government restricted-party list. Headings. Section headings are for convenience only and do not affect interpretation.

21. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Reach us at hello@meridiaoutdoors.com.