Site Usage Policy

The Waterways Guide provides an information service for paddlers based on community collaborated content. The Waterways Guide Service is owned and operated through PaddleNSW and managed by a Committee of Management representing interested paddlers/parties/like minded organisations to provide a website under the domain name "the Waterways Guide" and distributes information through publications, mobile apps.  The Waterways Guide Service may be provided through third party organisations.

The Waterways Guide Service is available for your use only on condition that you agree to these terms of use. By accessing/using any application, publication or website associated with the Waterways Guide, you are signifying your agreement to be bound by these terms.

Dangerous nature of content

The Waterways Guide Service covers content for paddling in all waterways. Paddling is extremely dangerous and can result in serious injury or death. Users acting on any information directly or indirectly available from this site do so at their own risk.

By using the Waterways Guide Service, you acknowledge that the material described is extremely dangerous, and that the content may be misleading or wrong.

In aggregating content, the Waterways Guide Service does not verify or validate the accuracy of any information that has been provided by publications, websites or users, nor does the Waterways Guide Service imply that any publication or website listed is fit for a particular purpose or merchantable.

There may be errors (typographical, systematic or semi-systematic) in the content whereby the information presented may not be accurate. Examples of some of these errors include river grades represented as easier than they are quoted in a publication, river height being higher than quoted due to the last accurate river gauge reading and heavy rainfall.

It is recommended that you review multiple guidebooks and consult with local paddlers to verify information presented by the Waterways Guide Service.

Ratings of difficulty and protection may be subjective and depend on the physical attributes, fitness, experience and confidence of the paddler who supplied the rating.

Often rivers and open water is harder than the ratings suggest for various reasons - river height and the effect of tide and weather can play a marked effect on the current conditions.

You should use your own judgement as to a potential hazard.

There are no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or reliability of information presented by the Waterways Guide Service. There are no warranties as to the fitness for purpose of any information presented by Waterways Guide Service.

Your use of the Waterways Guide Service indicates your assumption of the risk that it may contain errors and an acknowledgement of your own sole responsibility for your paddling safety.

Acceptable Content

You may not submit information which is offensive or derogatory to an individual or group in society.

If you do submit offensive or derogatory information it will be cleansed from the database and your ongoing access to the database may be discontinued.

The Waterways Guide Service management reserves the right to decide what is and is not acceptable content.

If you come across offensive or derogatory information provided by the Waterways Guide Service then you should contact feedback@waterwaysguide.org.au.  Please note that information is sometimes cached and/or used in offline mode on various platforms; in which case it may take some time for removed information to be taken off all distribution channels.

You may not submit information from a third-party source unless you have express permission from the copyright owner.

Modifications to the Terms

The Waterways Guide Service may revise and update these terms of use at any time. You will be notified if these terms change when you login using standard user name and password on the website. It is your responsibility to otherwise check for changes in the terms and conditions. Your continued usage of Waterways Guide Service after any changes to these terms of use will mean you accept those changes.

User Contributions

Standard users contributing to Waterways Guide Service are required to grant broad permissions to the Waterways Guide, and the general public to re-distribute and re-use your contributions.

As a standard user, submissions you make to Waterways Guide Service will be released to the public and 3rd parties under the Creative Commons - Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-NCSA) license. The Waterways Guide Service also reserves the right to offer this content under alternate licenses). Please refer to the Waterways Guide copyright statement for the details.

Waterways Guide Service supports mixed copyright, which means that non-standard user contributions from publishers may fall under other copyright arrangements. Submissions made on behalf of publishers will be released under the publisher copyright.

Waterways Guide Service is a collection of micro works. Hundreds of contributions from different paddlers may be combined to provide a collective community work for one area, under the administration of Waterways Guide Service.

For standard users, all content that is covered by intellectual property rights ("IP content"), you also specifically give us, subject to your account settings, the following permission: you grant Waterways Guide a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license in perpetuity to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with the Waterways Guide ("IP License").

This will allow Waterways Guide Management to explore other revenue channels (e.g. iphone app and other collaborative projects). If you would rather contribute to the Waterways guide as a publisher under a different arrangement instead of as a standard user, please contact us.

License and Ownership

The general philosophy of the Waterways Guide is to share and distribute the content for non-commercial use, hence we have adopted the Creative Commons - Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-NCSA) license for external use of user contributions on the site.

You may seek permission from the Waterways Guide Management to use the content commercially.

There are aspects to the site which fall outside user contributions. Therefore, unless otherwise specified in the copyright statement, all intellectual property rights (hereinafter called "intellectual property") associated with Waterways Guide Service and its material and contents (hereinafter called the "content") are the sole property of the Waterways Guide.

You may access content on the Waterways guide using standard browsers. The Waterways guide management will seek to provide other platforms for you to access content, but this may be at a premium.

Screen scraping for programmatic access is not permitted. All programmatic access must be made through the Waterways guide Management Application Programming Interface (API).

Level of Service

The Waterways Guide  management does not guarantee the service level or integrity of any data you submit.

Inactive accounts may be discontinued

The Waterways Guide Service management has the right to terminate an account at any time without notice.

Privacy

Personal details (including email address) are not passed on to any third party unless explicitly requested by the user, required by law or as the direct fulfilment of the offered service.

The Waterways Guide Management may contact you at your email address as per the Waterways Guide privacy policy.

In some instances, the site does not use a secure internet protocol for web login and therefore your login request will be transferred unencrypted over the public Internet before it is encoded on our site. It is therefore recommended that you use a different password from all your other passwords. Do NOT use your bank PIN or other important passwords.

Limitation of Liability

When accessing Waterways Guide Service via a network (mobile, ISP or other) you acknowledge that the terms of agreement with your respective network provider ("Network Provider") will continue to apply. As a result, you may be charged by the Network Provider for access to network connection services for the duration of the connection while accessing the Waterways Guide Service or any such third party charges as may arise. You accept responsibility for any such charges that arise.

To the fullest extent permitted by law and to the extent that the Waterways guide management is otherwise found responsible for any damages, PaddleNSW is responsible for actual damages only. In no event shall PaddleNSW  be liable for any incidental, indirect, exemplary, punitive and/or consequential damages, lost profits, or damages resulting from lost data or business interruption resulting from the use of or inability to use the Waterways Guide Service.

Jurisdiction

To the fullest extent permitted by law the law applicable to use of the website and to disputes arising is the law of the State of New South Wales, Australia.