Terms of service

This is a draft prepared without a lawyer. A lawyer reviews it before launch.

Effective [date]. Version 0.1.

These terms are between you and [Company] ("we", "us"), the maker of Sieve ("the app"). Installing or using the app means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not install the app, and ask for a refund under section 7.

1. What Sieve is

Sieve ranks photographs you already own. It reads your photo library, measures your frames on your own machine, learns from the stars and rejects you have given, and proposes which frames of a new shoot you would rate highly. Today it runs entirely on your Mac. Later versions may add features that use our servers or your other devices. Each of those is off until you turn it on, and section 10 describes them.

2. Your license

When you buy a license, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to install and use the app while these terms are in force.

• One license covers one person. Install it on up to [N] Macs you own or control, and let nobody else use it.
• A license bought by an organization covers one named individual. Other people need their own.
• Do not sell, rent, sublicense, share or publish a license key. We may deactivate a key we find published.
• We may offer a free tier or a trial with fewer features. These terms apply to it, and we may change or end it at any time.

3. What we do not promise about the picks

The picks are an aid to your judgment and nothing more. The app fits a statistical model on marks you made. It will rank frames you would have thrown away above frames you would have printed, and it will do this more on some shoots than others. You are the photographer and you decide.

We promise nothing about accuracy, lift, capture rate, or how the app behaves on your library. Any number we publish is measured on a stated library and is not a prediction about yours. Do not put the app between a shoot and a delivery with nobody looking, and do not delete anything on the strength of a score.

4. Your photographs and your files

The app never deletes an image file and never overwrites one. It does not alter the bytes of a photograph. That is how it is built, not only what we promise.

When you turn writing on, the app creates or updates XMP sidecar files beside your originals, holding star ratings you set yourself. Sidecars are a shared format: other applications read them and other applications overwrite them. If Lightroom, Capture One or darktable rewrites a sidecar we wrote, those applications are working normally and that is not something we can prevent.

Keep your own backups. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost, corrupted or deleted photographs, catalogs, sidecars or metadata, whatever the cause.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• process images you have no right to process;
• extract, copy, retrain on, distribute or resell the model files, or use the app's outputs to build a competing model or service;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the app, except where that right cannot be excluded by law;
• work around licensing, metering or update checks;
• use the app to score, identify or track people, or to build datasets of other people's images without their consent.

6. The model

The app includes a third-party vision model under its own open-source license, with the attribution and license text in the app's About panel, and components we trained ourselves. Our model files, code and interface are ours or our licensors', and are licensed to you only as part of the app.

The model your copy fits on your own marks is yours. You can delete it, and you can copy it out under section 9.

7. Payment and refunds

Prices are shown before you buy, in the currency displayed, with tax added where it is required. Sales may run through a payment provider acting as merchant of record. Their terms cover the transaction, and we never receive your card details.

Refunds: [refund policy. Intended: a full refund within 30 days of purchase, for any reason, once per person, by writing to [email].] A refund ends your license and you stop using the app.

If we offer a subscription alongside the one-time purchase, it renews for the stated period until you cancel, cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you paid for, and a part-used period is not refunded unless the law says otherwise. We tell you before a price change, and it applies from your next renewal.

8. Updates, and the end of the app

A purchase includes updates for the period stated at the time of sale. After that the app keeps working. You keep a perpetual right to use the last version you received, offline, with no check-in to us.

If we stop selling or supporting Sieve we will post a notice, and where we can, publish a final build that needs nothing from our servers. Your local data stays yours: the library index, the measurements, the model fitted on your marks, and every sidecar the app wrote. We do not reach into your machine to remove them.

9. Your data, export and deletion

Everything the app makes on your machine sits in one folder you can copy, move, back up or delete. Removing the app does not touch your photographs or your sidecars.

For anything we hold about you, which today is an email address if you joined the waitlist and a purchase record if you bought, the Privacy Policy says what we keep, for how long, and how to have it sent to you or deleted.

10. Features we may add

The app may gain features that involve our servers or your other devices. Each is off until you turn it on, and each is described in the app before you do:

• syncing your marks and your fitted model between Macs you own;
• training on your embeddings in the cloud. Embeddings are measurements, not pixels. Your photographs are never uploaded unless a feature says plainly that it uploads them and you turn that feature on;
• a web application, and mobile applications, including reading favorites from a phone photo library;
• sharing a set of picks with another person by a link;
• diagnostics beyond the anonymous counts described in the Privacy Policy;
• integrations with other editors, such as Lightroom, Capture One and Photo Mechanic.

When a feature moves anything off your machine, the Privacy Policy states exactly what moves and the app asks first. Cloud features may carry their own additional terms, availability limits and prices, and may be withdrawn on notice.

Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Capture One, Photo Mechanic, Bridge and darktable are other companies' products. We are not affiliated with them and do not control them, so we cannot promise an integration keeps working when they change.

11. Termination

You may stop using the app at any time. We may suspend or end your license if you materially breach these terms. We will say why and, where the breach can be fixed, give you a chance to fix it. On termination you stop using the app and delete your copies. Sections 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13 and 15 survive.

12. Warranties and liability

The app is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty that the app will be uninterrupted, free of defects, or produce any particular result. Where a jurisdiction does not allow this, it applies as far as it can and your statutory rights are untouched.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost work, lost images, lost data or lost goodwill, whether or not we were warned they were possible. Our total liability arising out of or relating to the app and these terms is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law says cannot be limited.

You will indemnify us against claims, damages and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of the app in breach of these terms or in breach of anyone's rights, including rights in the images you process.

13. Intellectual property and copyright complaints

Sieve, its name, interface, code and models are ours or our licensors'. These terms grant no rights in them beyond section 2. Your photographs remain entirely yours. We claim no rights in them and we never see them.

If you believe something we publish infringes your copyright, write to [email] identifying the work, where it appears, your contact details, and a statement under penalty of perjury that you own the work or are authorized to act for the owner. We will respond, and we terminate repeat infringers.

14. Disputes

[Arbitration placeholder. Intended: a dispute we cannot settle within 30 days of written notice goes to binding individual arbitration before [arbitration provider] under its consumer rules, seated in [State]. No class or representative actions. Either party may bring a qualifying claim in small claims court instead. You may opt out of arbitration by writing to [email] within 30 days of first accepting these terms. Consumers in places where this is unenforceable keep their local court rights.]

15. General

We may change these terms for future use of the app. Material changes are posted here with a new effective date and, where we have your email address, sent to it at least 14 days beforehand. Using the app after that date means you accept them. If you do not, stop using the app, and if the change harms you materially and you bought recently, ask for a refund.

[State] law governs these terms, without regard to its conflict of law rules, and subject to consumer protections that apply where you live. If a provision is unenforceable the rest stands. Not enforcing a provision is not waiving it. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement about the app. You may not assign them. We may, to a successor of the business, on notice.

Contact: [Company], [address]. [email].