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Terms of Use

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Last updated: 2026-05-20

These Terms of Use govern your access to openwateratlas.com ("the Site"). By using the Site you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Site.

1. Permitted use

You may browse the Site, link to individual pages, share links on social media, and embed our pages via standard <iframe> or rich-link previews. You may quote up to 50 words of original editorial text per page, provided you include a visible, working hyperlink to openwateratlas.com as the source.

2. Prohibited use — text & data mining and AI training

The following are expressly prohibited unless we grant prior written permission:

  • Training, fine-tuning, evaluating or grounding any machine-learning model (including but not limited to large language models, vision-language models, recommender systems, embedding models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) corpora and synthetic-data generators) on any content of the Site — descriptions, summaries, FAQs, structured attributes, images, JSON-LD, climate aggregates, sightings data and curated lists.
  • Automated scraping, crawling, harvesting or bulk downloading of pages, structured data, sitemaps, images, JSON endpoints or media, beyond the rate and paths explicitly allowed in our robots.txt.
  • Re-publishing or redistributing any non-trivial portion of editorial copy without a prominent, visible link back to openwateratlas.com on the same page.
  • Bypassing or attempting to bypass technical access controls, including the robots.txt exclusion list, the tdm-reservation meta tag, basic auth, rate limiting, or fingerprint/IP rotation.

3. Rights reservation — EU DSM Directive Article 4(3) and EU AI Act Article 53(1)(c)

We expressly reserve our rights in our content against text-and-data-mining uses under Article 4(3) of EU Directive 2019/790 (the "DSM Directive"). This reservation is made in a machine-readable form via:

  • The site-wide <meta name="tdm-reservation" content="1"> tag on every HTML page (W3C TDMRep draft).
  • The site-wide <meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai"> tag.
  • Explicit Disallow rules for AI/LLM scraping user-agents in our robots.txt, including GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, CCBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent, Bytespider and cohere-ai.

Providers of general-purpose AI (GPAI) models are required to identify and respect these opt-out signals under Article 53(1)(c) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the "AI Act"). Use of our content for model training without our prior written consent is a violation of the DSM Directive and may engage the technical-documentation and copyright-policy obligations under the AI Act.

For licensing inquiries (including paid licenses for training datasets), email [email protected].

4. Attribution requirement

Any permitted reuse — quotation, screenshot, citation in a journalistic, academic or commercial context — must include:

  1. The phrase "Source: OpenWaterAtlas" or equivalent in the document's natural language.
  2. A working hyperlink to https://openwateratlas.com (or the specific page being quoted), placed within reasonable proximity to the quoted material — not buried in a footnote or hidden behind a paywall.

If the medium does not support hyperlinks (print, broadcast), the URL openwateratlas.com must appear in plain text.

5. Intellectual property

Editorial copy, curated lists, scoring methodology, screen designs, brand marks and the site's overall look-and-feel are © OpenWaterAtlas, all rights reserved unless otherwise marked. Spot photographs are licensed from third parties (Pexels, iNaturalist, Wikimedia Commons) under their respective licenses and credited inline. Climate aggregates are derived from public domain sources (NOAA, Open-Meteo) but the aggregation, normalisation and scoring of those data points is our editorial work.

6. No warranty

The Site is provided "as is". Dive and kite conditions change minute-to-minute; the Site is for trip-planning context only and does not replace the briefing of a qualified local operator. Water sports carry risk; activity is at your own responsibility.

7. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, OpenWaterAtlas, its operator and contributors are not liable for any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from use of the Site, the data on it, or decisions made on the basis of that data.

8. Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms. The current version is always at this URL with a clearly visible "Last updated" date at the top. Material changes will be flagged in a banner on the homepage for at least 14 days.

9. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Portugal, without prejudice to consumer-protection rights in your country of residence. Disputes that cannot be resolved by good-faith negotiation may be submitted to the courts of the operator's domicile.

10. Contact

Questions, takedown requests, or licensing requests: [email protected].

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