Contributor Terms

Version pilot-2026-08 · Last updated 30 August 2026

These terms govern contributing AIS reception data to Pelyr Network — running your own receiving station, registering it in the contributor portal, and delivering what it picks up to our ingest endpoint. The stations, the portal and the services behind them are what these terms call the “Network”. You accept these terms when you unlock the contributor portal.

They govern one role, not your whole account. The same account can also be a customer of our live stream or of our HTTPS API, and that use is governed independently by the Pelyr API Terms. Neither document limits the other, and neither grants what the other governs: running a station does not by itself widen what you may receive through the stream. Access to station-sourced data on the stream is granted by hand, case by case, and never automatically — a station of your own is not a key to everyone else’s.

Throughout this document, “we” means the operator named in section 1, “you” means the person who runs the station, and “your station” means the receiving station you registered. What your station delivers to us is called contributed data; section 4 sets out exactly what that covers. What you may earn for running a station is called a reward, and the whole of it is the reward programme.

1. Who operates the Network

The Network is operated by:

Timo Zürner
private individual, operating under the brand “Pelyr”
Gerichtsstraße 13, 9300 St. Veit an der Glan, Austria
Email: hello@pelyr.com

Pelyr Network is a private, non-commercial project. How personal data is handled is set out in the Privacy Policy.

That is how the project is run today. It is not a promise that the data will never be charged for. If charging ever changes what the operator has to register, we register it. It changes nothing about the rights you granted.

2. What contributing means

Contributing means three things.

• You run your own receiving station. Your own equipment, at the location you register, with software that posts what it hears to us. The setup we support is AIS-catcher; when you issue a station token, the portal hands you the finished command line, with your station and its token already filled in.
• You register that station in the contributor portal, with its position. The portal itself is unlocked with a GitHub sign-in, a contact address and your agreement to these terms.
• Your station delivers to the ingest endpoint. It authenticates there with the station’s token. You can revoke it and issue a new one at any time; a revocation takes effect at once.

A newly registered station is pending, not active. Only an active station may deliver: while a station is pending, suspended or disabled, the ingest endpoint refuses its posts and nothing it sends is counted. Activation is a decision taken by a person.

Activation is not something you can claim. We may decline to activate a station, or take our time over it, and we do not have to give a reason. Buy hardware on the understanding that the station may never be switched on.

3. Your station, and what we expect of it

Five expectations.

• The position you register must be true. A report from farther away than we accept from a terrestrial station is discarded as out of range. You can see those discards in the portal, each with its reason. If your station moves, change its position in the portal. Only the position you registered is used for this; a marked difference from the one your software reports is treated as an indication that something is wrong.
• Register each physical receiver once. One receiver, one station. The same hardware entered twice, under two stations, is not a second contribution — it is the same reception counted twice, and it is not permitted.
• Deliver only what your own station received. Do not forward data from another station, from another network, or from a public feed into the ingest endpoint.
• Do not manipulate or replay data. No recordings played back as if they were live, no shifted timestamps, no invented messages. Availability is recorded against our server clock, not against the time your station reports.
• Keep the station token to yourself. Anyone who holds it can deliver in your station’s name, and everything delivered with it is recorded as your station’s. If it has been exposed, revoke it in the portal and issue a new one.

Every post also carries what your software reports about itself and about the device, including its serial number. Where one of them raises a suspicion, the value is kept with the record of that suspicion; otherwise nothing of it is retained — except where a raw capture is running for that station (section 10), in which case it is kept with the rest of that station’s uploads and deleted together with them, on the schedule set out in section 12 of the Privacy Policy.

We use these fields to operate the Network and to check that contributions are genuine. They are not part of what section 4 licenses to us, and they do not travel with the data we pass on. The serial number is the most useful hint we have that one physical receiver has been registered twice under two stations. It is also an unreliable one — receivers are shipped in large numbers carrying the same serial number — which is why nothing is ever decided on that field alone.

4. The rights you grant us

When your station delivers data to us, you grant us a licence to use it.

You grant us the right to store, process, copy, adapt, combine, analyse, publish, transmit and otherwise use the data your station delivers, and everything we derive from it. The licence is perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, transferable and sub-licensable, and it covers any purpose — including making the data, or a service built on it, available to third parties for a fee.

Contributed data means the AIS messages your station receives together with everything that travels with them: the raw NMEA sentences, the reception time, the AIS channel and the reported signal strength.

We may pass these rights on. A recipient of our stream receives the right to use what it receives, to pass it on further, and to grant that same right onward. The same rights pass to whoever operates Pelyr Network after us, should operation of the project ever be transferred.

We decide on what terms recipients receive contributed data, including the licence label and the attribution text declared for it — both of which we declare to recipients. You are not named. No recipient is asked to credit you, your station or its location, and none is given anything to credit: the attribution declared for contributed data names the Network, not a contributor.

Why the licence goes this far: what a recipient of our stream receives stays subject to the licences of its sources, and those licences permit further use and redistribution. Our Pelyr API Terms tell recipients that we do not cut into those rights. Contributed data travels in the same stream as our other sources, message by message, and cannot be taken back out of it afterwards. A licence we could withdraw, or one that stopped at the first recipient, would turn that promise false on the day it mattered.

You keep whatever rights you hold in the data yourself. This is a licence, not a handover: it takes nothing away from you, and it is not exclusive — see section 5.

5. Your participation is not exclusive

The same data may go anywhere else you like, at any time. To another AIS network, to a commercial platform, to your own archive. You need no permission from us, and you do not have to tell us.

This is not a favour that could be taken back later. The setup we hand you adds one output to your receiver, which posts to our ingest endpoint, and changes nothing else about it. Whatever your receiver already feeds — other networks, a local target, your own logging — stays exactly where it is.

The licence in section 4 is not exclusive either. Delivering the same data elsewhere does not narrow it, and does not conflict with it: both can be true of the same message. We do not ask where else your data goes, and it makes no difference to anything in these terms.

6. What we publish, and what we don’t

6.1 The public coverage map

The public map never shows a station identifier, a station coordinate, a station name, a contributor name, a GitHub login or an email address. That is a hard promise. The location you register for your station is stored — we need it to check whether a reception is within plausible range — and it appears in no public response.

The map cannot be asked for a finer resolution than the one at which coverage is stored and scored; a request for something finer is clamped, not honoured.

6.2 The live stream

Under section 4 we may pass contributed data on to recipients of our Stream API. When we do, it carries no station-related identifier — no station ID, no station name, no station coordinate — and no marking of its origin: nothing a recipient receives says which station a message came from, or that it came from a community station at all.

What we do not promise is that nothing can be inferred. Coverage itself is public by design, and positions and times are the data itself: anyone who follows which vessels appear where, and when, can draw conclusions about where the Network receives. No removal of identifiers changes that. Our promise is the narrower one, and we would rather state it plainly: nobody is handed a label saying which station a message came from, or where that station stands.

7. Rewards are a bonus, not an entitlement

Running a station may earn you a reward. It does not entitle you to one.

During the pilot, runs are simulations: they compute a score only, and nothing is paid out. Every run records whether it was one, and that mark travels with each reward record we show you. A run marked as a simulation produces a score, a ruleset version and a full breakdown — and no payment.

Figures we publish are description, not promise. They describe how a calculation came out, or would come out, under the rules in force and the data present at that moment. While a month is still running, the availability figure on your dashboard can be an interim calculation; where it is, it is marked as such. None of it is an offer, a forecast or a guarantee.

These terms set up no payment process. There is no payout method in the Network today, and nothing here obliges us to introduce one. If a reward is ever paid to you, declaring it and paying any tax on it where you live is your responsibility. We do not withhold tax and we issue no tax documents.

We may change, suspend or discontinue the reward programme at any time, in whole or in part, with or without a successor, and without owing you anything for what a different set of rules would have produced.

This is separate from the data. Changing or ending the reward programme does not affect the rights you have granted in contributed data already delivered, and those rights are not conditional on any reward being calculated or paid.

The programme is nonetheless part of this agreement — running it is why we measure your station at all. Being part of the agreement does not turn it into a claim: no month, no figure and no completed run creates one.

8. Qualifying, and losing what you earned

Rewards are assessed per station and per calendar month. A month either counts for a station or it does not — there is nothing in between.

8.1 The monthly availability requirement

Each station must reach a minimum availability over the month, and no single continuous outage may exceed a maximum length. Both conditions must be met. These terms name no figures. The values in force are set out in the whitepaper. Where we change either value, the new figure applies only to a month that begins after the change is published there — a change we have not published that way is not applied against you.

Miss either condition and the station’s entire score for that month falls away. It is not reduced in proportion, it is not carried into the next month, and it cannot be made up later. Every hexagon the station covered and every rank it held counts for nothing in that month. If none of your stations meets the conditions, you also take no part in the early-contributor share for that month.

What the station achieved stays visible. The coverage and rank figures stay in your dashboard for that month, so you can see exactly what the station achieved and which of the two conditions it missed.

Three things in that measurement work in your favour:

• Availability is counted from the presence of a heartbeat minute, not from how many messages arrived. A station on a quiet stretch of coast, with no vessel passing all night, is online — not idle.
• Minutes lost to an outage on our side are taken out of the calculation entirely, out of the availability figure and out of the longest outage alike. You are not measured against our failures.
• Measurement starts with the first minute your station actually delivered, not with the day you registered it. The days between registering a station and getting the antenna on air, and the days it spends waiting for activation, fall outside the measurement entirely.

One limit remains. A station that has never delivered a single minute is measured from the day you registered it — there is no earlier point on record — and the same applies to a station delivering over the UDP path, because that path books no availability minutes at all.

8.2 A rank expires when the station goes quiet

A rank in a hexagon is not property. Ranks are formed in each run from the order of first qualification. A station that joins later never takes a rank from one that qualified earlier, and the order of first qualification is the only thing that decides it.

What can cost you a rank is your own silence. Inactivity is counted in whole months for each claim to a rank. Once inactivity exceeds the limit set in the rules, the claim is left out before the ranks are formed, and everyone behind it moves up.

An expired claim is ignored, not deleted: earlier runs still reproduce exactly, and while the claim is expired it counts for nothing. What happens if you come back later is decided by the reward rules in force at that time, and those rules can change (section 9).

9. The rules can change

The figures a calculation runs on are not part of these terms. What a rank is worth, the early-contributor tiers, how the pool is split, the availability thresholds, the hexagon size used for scoring, the inactivity limit, any cap on a single reward — these are the kind of values the published reward rules set, and we may adopt a new set at any time. Where a rule needs more than a new value, we say so where the rules are published.

What does not change is a run that is already finished.

A ruleset is immutable. Changing a value creates a new version rather than editing the existing one, and each run stays tied to the version it was calculated with. A completed run is therefore never re-evaluated under later rules. You can check this yourself: every reward record in your dashboard names the ruleset version it was produced under.

New rules apply going forward, from the first run that uses them. Where we change the rules, we publish the change where the rules themselves are published.

10. Raw capture, and when we switch it on

We keep no blanket raw archive of what stations upload. There is one exception.

Where there is a concrete suspicion that contributions are being manipulated, or where a fault in your station’s delivery cannot be traced from the metadata alone, we can switch on a raw capture for a single station — yours included. While it is on, that station’s complete uploads are stored.

The capture is bound to an end time. What we set is a timestamp, not an on-and-off switch: once it passes, the recording stops by itself.

Three points, plainly:

• It applies to one station at a time. It is not a Network-wide recording, and there is deliberately no facility to make it one.
• It serves two purposes, and no others: checking whether contributions are genuine, and tracing a delivery fault that the metadata does not explain. It is not switched on for anything else.
• We will not tell you beforehand. That is a deliberate decision, and saying so here is the notice you get. A recording announced in advance is worthless against the manipulation it exists to detect.

A capture never changes how your station is answered. Your uploads are accepted or refused exactly as they would be without one, and a recording that cannot be written is logged on our side rather than turned into an error for you.

Section 12 of the Privacy Policy governs the data protection side of a capture. That page governs, and the purposes named there are the purposes a capture may serve. Nothing in this section extends it.

11. Suspension

Only a station in the active state may deliver. A station that is pending, suspended or disabled has every upload refused, and the positions in a refused upload are not taken in. They count for nothing.

We may set a station to suspended or disabled, and we may suspend the account behind it. We will do so in particular where there is a suspicion of manipulation, or where you have broken section 3. A suspended account is treated as signed out.

The decision is made by a person. Suspicion reports are collected automatically into a queue for review, but nothing on that queue suspends anything by itself.

A suspension carries no compensation. It cannot: under section 7 there is no entitlement to a reward in the first place, so there is nothing to make good. What a suspension does in practice is cost the station its availability for as long as it lasts — a suspended station simply falls short of the availability requirement in section 8.1. There is no separate penalty on top of that.

Objections to a suspension go to hello@pelyr.com. Your station’s own log will show little more than that its uploads were refused — the setup we hand you switches the endpoint’s replies off — so the reason belongs in that email.

If you believe a suspension is wrong, write to hello@pelyr.com.

12. Ending this agreement

You can stop at any time. Switching your station off is enough — there is no notice period and nothing to cancel. A station that sends nothing simply earns nothing.

If you want the account gone as well: an account with no station attached can be deleted on request, and that deletion takes effect at once — write to hello@pelyr.com. Where a station is still attached, deletion is not a single step. That is deliberate: records attached to the station would otherwise be deleted with it, unnoticed. Write to hello@pelyr.com and we will handle it as described in the Privacy Policy, which sets out for each kind of record whether it is deleted, anonymised or kept.

Section 4 survives the end of this agreement. The rights you granted us in contributed data you have already delivered remain in full and without a time limit, whatever else ends. Ending this agreement stops future deliveries; it does not reach backwards. Data already delivered stays with us, and whatever has already been passed on stays passed on.

This is the one part of this agreement you cannot undo later.

13. No warranty, and what we are liable for

This project is free in both directions: nothing is charged to you, and nothing is owed to you (section 7).

No availability commitment

The ingest endpoint, the portal and everything computed behind them are provided “as is” and “as available”. There is no uptime guarantee, no service level agreement, and no commitment that an upload will be accepted, that a period will be calculated, or that a figure shown to you today will still be shown tomorrow. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of it at any time. An upload may also be refused for reasons on our side; that is not a fault of your station, and it is not a claim.

To the extent permitted by applicable law:

• We are liable without limitation for damages arising from injury to life, body or health.
• Beyond that, we are liable for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence. For slight negligence we are liable only where an essential contractual obligation is breached, and then only up to the damage typically foreseeable for a project of this kind provided without charge.
• We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of data, or for any damage arising from uploads not accepted, records not stored, figures not calculated, or a station suspended under section 11.
• The cost of taking part is yours. Receiver, antenna, power, internet connection and your time are your contribution to a shared project, and this agreement does not reimburse them.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including under the Austrian Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz). If you are a consumer, your rights under mandatory law are unaffected — this section does only what the law allows it to do.

14. Changes to these terms

We may amend these terms. The current version is always published here with its version number; this one is pilot-2026-08.

A new version needs your consent again. Your acceptance is recorded together with the version it refers to. An acceptance that does not name the current version is not treated as consent to it and is refused. Where the version you accepted is no longer the current one, the portal tells you which version is current, links to it, and asks you to confirm it. Until you do, the version on record stays as it is.

If you do not accept a new version, stop delivering. That is the only consequence, and it works exactly as set out in section 12 — including that section 4 continues to apply to everything you have already delivered.

15. Governing law, jurisdiction, and severability

These terms are governed by Austrian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer within the meaning of the Austrian Consumer Protection Act (Konsumentenschutzgesetz), this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of your place of residence. For all other contributors, the courts competent for St. Veit an der Glan, Austria shall have exclusive jurisdiction.

If any provision of these terms is or becomes invalid, the validity of the remaining provisions is unaffected.