Terms of service

The agreement between you and FishCoin. It says what you get, what you give us in return, and — the part most terms pages skip — what the measurement is actually worth.

Last updated 18 August 2026.

1. Who this agreement is with

"FishCoin", "we" and "us" mean FishCoin Pty Ltd, which operates the FishCoin apps and this website. "You" means the person using them.

The telephone number is a United States one and the company is Australian. That is deliberate, not a mistake on this page.

2. The exchange, stated plainly

Measuring a fish costs us something: storage, computing time, and machines that run the measuring software. We do not charge you for it and there is no advertising in the app.

What pays for it is the captures. Every clip and photo that comes in is evidence a measuring system can be improved against, and the measurements and positions are useful to fisheries research. That is the deal: you get the measurement, we get the capture. We would rather write that down in one sentence at the top than have you work it out later.

3. Who can use it

You must be at least 13 years old. FishCoin is not designed for or directed at children. We do not currently ask your age or verify it; if we learn that someone under 13 has been using it, we will remove what we hold.

If you are under the age at which you can enter a contract where you live, you need a parent or guardian to agree to these terms with you.

You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for fishing lawfully wherever you fish. That is set out in full in section 9, because it is easy to assume that a contract governed by one country's law somehow settles the fishing rules in another. It does not.

4. Rights in what you capture

This is the section that matters most, so it is written out in full rather than summarised.

What you keep

You keep the copyright in your photographs and videos. They are yours; you can post them anywhere else you like, sell them, or enter them in a photography competition. Nothing here takes that away.

What you grant us

When you submit a capture to FishCoin — from the app, or from any upload form on this website — you grant us a licence over it. That licence is:

Under that licence we may store, copy, back up, adapt, crop, re-encode, annotate, publish, display and distribute the capture, and make derived works from it — including measurements, extracted frames, training data, statistics, and published results. Specifically, and so there is no doubt about the use that matters to us, we may use your captures to build, train, test, correct and demonstrate the measuring and identification software, and to show them on public pages of this site and in the app.

The position it was caught at

The GPS position of a catch is ours to keep and to use indefinitely, including in aggregate statistics and in data supplied to fishery-management and research bodies. That is a right you are granting, not an account of what happens today: no catch data is currently supplied to anyone outside FishCoin.

We describe that as a permission rather than a licence for a reason worth saying out loud: there is no copyright in a coordinate. A latitude and longitude is a fact, and facts cannot be licensed. So what you are agreeing to here is that we may keep and use it, and that you will not later ask us to stop or claim a right over it — not that you are transferring something you owned.

What a third party would get, and what would be deliberately withheld, is set out under Catch data and research bodies in the privacy policy. The short version: the measurement, the scale reference, the exact coordinates and the time, with no identifier of any kind attached. That page also records that none of it is being supplied at present.

Why a licence and not an assignment — and why it makes no practical difference

The owner's position is that a user forfeits their rights in the image and the position once it is captured. We have written that as a broad licence rather than an assignment of copyright, deliberately, and it is worth saying which was chosen and why:

• An assignment achieves nothing extra here. Everything we actually want to do — keep it forever, publish it, train on it, hand it to our own processors, carry it to a buyer of the business — the licence above already permits. There is no fourth thing an assignment would unlock.
• An assignment is the weaker instrument in practice. In the United States a transfer of copyright ownership is only effective if it is in a signed writing. A clickthrough is contested ground for that; an exclusive licence has the same problem. A broad non-exclusive licence does not, which means the version we have chosen is the one more likely to still be standing if anyone ever argues about it.
• It costs the angler nothing they would miss. Under an assignment, an angler could no longer post their own fish photo on their own account without our permission. That is a surprising and hostile outcome which buys us nothing, and it is the kind of term that turns into a complaint rather than a dataset.

If a lawyer reviewing this page concludes an assignment is genuinely needed, that is a change to make on advice, not a gap left by accident.

It survives your account being deleted

Deleting your account does not end this licence and does not delete your captures. Deletion works by cutting your identity away from the record rather than destroying the record: your name, email address, phone number, profile photograph, payout handle, device identifier, sign-in account and the internal identifier tying them to your catches are all destroyed, and the catch — the measurement, the video, the photo and the location — stays, as anonymous data.

The reasons are the ones the privacy policy gives: a scored competition somebody else took part in cannot be unwound after the fact, and the measurements are the dataset this product is built on.

What you are promising us about it

By submitting a capture you confirm that you took it or have the right to submit it, that you have the permission of anybody identifiable in it, and that submitting it does not break anyone else's rights or any law.

5. Competitions, challenges and leaderboards

Player-versus-player challenges have their own rules, and they are the operative ones: How challenges work. Entry fees, when you are charged, the prize pool, the tournament fee, cancellation and what counts as a qualifying catch are all settled there. They are linked from the challenge itself in the app and emailed to everyone when a challenge locks in.

Those rules are not repeated here, on purpose. The challenge-rules page is generated from the app's own text, so it and the app cannot drift apart. A second copy of the rules in this page could — and the copy that drifts is always the one somebody quotes. Where the two pages could be read differently, the challenge rules win.

Two things this page does add, because they are about the agreement rather than about any one contest:

• Only a measured catch counts, and whether a catch is measured, published, held for review or rejected is our decision, made by the pipeline described in section 6 and by human review. We can withhold or withdraw a catch from a leaderboard.
• Manipulating a result ends your participation. That includes submitting a fish you did not catch, re-submitting the same fish, photographing a screen, altering a capture, or faking a position. We can void entries, remove results and close accounts for it.

6. The service is provided as it is — especially the measurement

This is not the usual paragraph of legal padding. It is here because we have measured how accurate the system is and it is not accurate enough to promise anything.

The length measurement is an estimate

FishCoin estimates a fish's length from a camera, using the 76 mm token in the frame as its scale. Against tape measurements of the same fish, on the small sample we have:

• catches good enough to publish were on average about 12% away from the tape, and only about two in three were within 15%;
• the system reads roughly 7% long overall, and we have not corrected for it, because we do not yet know whether the cause is the measurement or a difference in how people lay the tape;
• these figures come from a few dozen comparisons, not thousands, so they themselves carry real uncertainty.

The species suggestion is an experiment

Where the app or this site offers a species or a group, treat it as a guess.

On real submissions, ours has been measured as no better than not guessing at all. Tested against photographs from a laboratory-style reference collection it does well; tested against actual catches sent in from boats and beaches, its accuracy at group level was indistinguishable from chance, and a fixed answer of "a finfish" beat it outright. That is a measurement of our own system, published in our own notes, and we would rather print it than let a confident-looking label imply something we know is not there.

And the rest of it

FishCoin is provided as is and as available. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that a capture will process, that a result will be produced at all, or that anything you upload will be kept available to you — keep your own copy of anything you care about. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and accuracy.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit, or for a decision you made on the strength of a measurement or a species suggestion. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you have paid us, which today is nothing.

Some places do not allow those exclusions at all, and Australia is one of them. Where the Australian Consumer Law applies, its consumer guarantees cannot be excluded, restricted or modified by a contract, and nothing in this section is intended to try. Everything above applies only as far as the law where you are allows, and no further. See section 9, which is where that question is still open.

7. What you must not do

• Upload anything unlawful, abusive, or that shows a person who did not agree to be shown.
• Upload anything that is not your capture to submit.
• Falsify a catch, a measurement or a position.
• Attempt to break, overload, scrape wholesale, or reverse-engineer the service, or to reach data belonging to other people.
• Use the service to harass another angler.

Published catches are visible to anyone with no login. If something should not be there — including your own face or details in somebody else's clip — you can report it without an account, and our practice for acting on reports is at fishcoin.ai/moderation.

8. Suspending or ending it

You can stop using FishCoin whenever you like, and close your account in the app under Settings → Delete my account or at fishcoin.ai/delete-account.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we can change or withdraw any part of the service. Section 4 (rights in what you capture), section 6 (no warranty) and section 9 (governing law) continue to apply after the agreement ends.

9. Governing law, and the much larger set of laws it does not touch

This agreement is governed by the law of Australia — FishCoin Pty Ltd is an Australian company and most of the people using FishCoin are in Australia. A dispute between you and us about this agreement is to be dealt with in the Australian courts, and we will not object to your bringing it in the state or territory where you live.

TO BE CONFIRMED — which Australian state's law is named, and whether the courts' jurisdiction is exclusive, is left for the legal review. The company is registered in Tasmania, which is the obvious candidate, but choosing between "the law of Tasmania" and "the law of the Commonwealth and of the state where the user lives" is a real decision with consequences and is not one to make by defaulting.

What this clause does not do

So, specifically:

• You are responsible for the fishing law where you fish. Licences, permits, bag and size limits, closed seasons, protected species, gear restrictions and rules about access to a place are matters between you and the authority for that place. An angler fishing in Nevada is subject to Nevada and United States federal regulation no matter what this contract says; the same is true everywhere else.
• Being in a challenge or a tournament authorises nothing. It is not a permit, it does not grant access to any water, shore, ramp, reserve or private land, and it does not substitute for a licence you would otherwise need. If entering a challenge would have you fishing somewhere you are not entitled to be, do not enter it.
• We make no representation that a challenge is permitted at any particular venue. Challenges are created by anglers, not by us. We do not check whether a location is open, lawful, in season, or safe.

Consumer protections you keep regardless

Where the Australian Consumer Law applies, its consumer guarantees cannot be excluded, restricted or modified by a contract, and nothing in section 6 is intended to try. Many other countries protect their own residents the same way, and those protections generally survive a choice-of-law clause too — so if you are outside Australia, you may well keep rights that this page does not mention. Nothing here is meant to remove a right you have that cannot be removed.

The privacy policy states the same choice of law, and records the correction from its earlier Nevada text under Changes at the foot of that page.

10. Changes

If what the service does changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Continuing to use FishCoin after a change means you accept the changed terms. If a change materially reduces what you get, we will say so on this page rather than let it pass silently.

11. Contact

Notices under these terms go to FishCoin Pty Ltd, 11 Charlton Street, Launceston, Tasmania 7250, Australia, or to info@fishcoinapp.com. The contact button at the bottom of the home page reaches us as well.

For anything about your personal information specifically — what we hold, correcting it, or deleting it — start at the privacy policy and fishcoin.ai/delete-account.