Contributor Terms

Version 2026-11 · Effective 23 October 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 gives your account no entitlement under the API Terms and no plan of the Service (section 7). Contributed data is part of the Pelyr data bundle.

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.

1. Who operates the Network

The Network is operated by:

Dr. Zürner GmbH
limited liability company, operating under the brand “Pelyr”
Gerichtsstraße 13, 9300 St. Veit an der Glan, Austria
FN 507663 p, Landesgericht Klagenfurt
Email: hello@pelyr.com

Further details on the operator are given in the Imprint. How personal data is handled is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Pelyr Network is part of Pelyr. Pelyr offers a Free plan and paid plans. Contributed data is part of what every account entitled to the stream receives, including accounts on paid plans. Contributing itself is free of charge, and it is not paid (section 7).

2. What contributing means

You must be at least 18 years old to contribute. By accepting these terms you confirm that you are.

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 sign-in to your Pelyr account (GitHub, or email and password), 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 vessel position your station receives that lies more than 250 km from the position you registered for the 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 8), 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. Irrevocable means that you cannot withdraw the licence for data you have already delivered; it does not take away your right to challenge this agreement for mistake or fraud.

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. We decide whether, to whom and on what terms recipients receive contributed data, and what they may do with it, including whether they may pass it on. We may also forward contributed data to other AIS networks, such as AISHub, in exchange for their data.

Those terms include the licence label and the attribution text declared for contributed data — 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: contributed data travels in the same stream as our other sources, message by message, and cannot be taken back out of it afterwards. We license what we deliver to every recipient, on the Free plan and on paid plans, under the Pelyr Data Licence, and we exchange data with other networks. A licence we could withdraw, or one that stopped at the first recipient, would leave every one of those recipients without a footing 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.

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 does not show a station identifier, a station coordinate, a station name, a contributor name, a GitHub login or an email address. 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; a request for something finer is clamped, not honoured.

6.2 What recipients receive

Under section 4 we may pass contributed data on. Whenever we do, through whatever channel — the live stream, the HTTPS API, the MCP server, alerts, exports, archive extracts or any other — it carries no station-related identifier (no station ID, no station name, no station coordinate). What we forward to another AIS network under section 4 is the raw AIS sentences, as part of our own feed, with no station identifier.

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. No payment

The availability figures and station statistics in your dashboard are information about your station. No right under these terms depends on them, and they are not an offer, a forecast or a guarantee. While a month is still running, the availability figure can be an interim calculation; where it is, it is marked as such.

8. 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.
• It serves two purposes: checking whether contributions are genuine, and tracing a delivery fault that the metadata does not explain.
• 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. Your right of access under the Privacy Policy is not affected.

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.

9. 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. Nothing under these terms is owed to you for a station’s operation (section 7). What a suspension does in practice is that the station’s uploads are refused for as long as it lasts; 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 when we suspend a station or an account because of what it delivered or because you broke these terms, we send you our reasons by email.

10. Ending this agreement

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

If you want the account gone as well: an account with no station attached can be deleted on request — 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, in the sense set out in section 4.

11. No warranty, and what we are liable for

Contributing is free in both directions: nothing is charged to you for it, and no money is owed to you for it (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.

For our liability, the following applies:

• 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 (an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of this agreement possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment you regularly rely and may rely), and then only up to the damage that, at the time this agreement was concluded, was objectively foreseeable as typical of a contract of this kind.
• Where we are liable for slight negligence only, 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 9.
• The cost of taking part is yours. Receiver, antenna, power, internet connection and your time are your contribution to the Network, and this agreement does not reimburse them.

Nothing in these terms limits liability under product liability law, including under the Austrian Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz).

12. Changes to these terms

We may amend these terms. The current version is always published here with its version number; this one is 2026-11.

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.

Until you confirm it, we may refuse your station’s deliveries.

If you do not want to accept a new version, you can stop delivering at any time. That works exactly as set out in section 10 — including that the licence you granted continues to apply to everything you have already delivered.

13. 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 — a natural person acting for purposes outside their trade or profession — this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence. If you are not a consumer, the courts competent for St. Veit an der Glan, Austria, have exclusive jurisdiction.

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