Terms of Service

The moment a user depends on any machinery described on this site, an agreement begins. That agreement does not need a signature or a sealed form; it is formed by your action. Creating an account, paying for a service, booking a demonstration or sending a message through the contact form all count as acceptance of the rules set out here.

These terms may be revised from time to time. When a material change is made, the Company will post an updated version on this page and will give accounted users a reasonable notice before the change takes effect. Continued use of the Services after the revised terms begin to apply means that you accept them.

If any single clause of these terms is found by a court to be unenforceable, that clause is severed, the rest of the agreement stands, and the Company will re-draft the severed clause with a text that keeps the same honest intent while satisfying the law.

The providing party under these terms is HMS FREEDOM, LLC, a limited liability company based at 19751 E 63RD Dr, Aurora - 80019-2174, United States (US). Throughout this document the Company, we and us all refer to HMS FREEDOM, LLC.

The website and the underlying systems were designed and built by the developer HMSFreedom. The developer contributes the code and the craft that the Services run on, while the Company answers under the law for the operation of the Services, for the invoices it raises and for the conduct of its own crew.

Nothing in this structure alters the fact that your one point of contact for service, billing and support is the Company at the address and the numbers shown at the end of these terms.

To keep these terms readable, a short set of definitions is set out first. The Services means the fleet tracking systems, voyage planning platforms, maintenance and dry-dock scheduling, crew rotation management, fuel and consumables analytics, port call coordination and all supporting documentation and support delivered by the Company.

A User is the individual who uses the Services and any organisation that the individual represents. An Account is the named subscription under which the Services are delivered. A Fleet Record means the vessel data, routes, schedules, rosters and logs that a user puts into the Services or that the Services receive on the users behalf.

Personal Information carries the meaning given in the Privacy Policy. A Service Provider is a third party the Company engages to help deliver the Services. In a dispute over meaning, the plain and ordinary sense of a word controls, and the heading of a section never overrides the body of a clause.

The Company provides computer systems design and related services, a professional scientific and technical service, and computer integrated systems design. In practical terms the Company supplies software and supporting services that a vessel operator uses to watch a fleet, plan a voyage, schedule a dock, rotate a crew, measure fuel and coordinate a port call.

The Services are delivered as instructed by the subscribed account. The Company does not promise that every function described on the site is available in every plan; the demonstration material on the website describes the capability of the product family rather than the exact footing of a particular contract. The plan that a user holds is set out in the order that the account accepted.

Support is included with every paying account and is described in the section on support below. A trial account is a courtesy, carries no fee and may be limited in either duration or function at the sole discretion of the Company.

You must be at least eighteen years of age to open an account or to request a demonstration through the Services. By applying you confirm that the information you supply is true, complete and current, and you agree to keep it that way for the life of the account.

An account belongs to the organisation that purchased it. Where one person acts as the account administrator, that person accepts the duty of naming the other users, setting each users powers and keeping the access list tidy when crew changes. The Company assumes that an act performed through a logged-in account was authorised by the account holder, and the account holder answers for it.

The Company may decline an application, and may close an account, where the applicant does not satisfy the eligibility rules, where the application is incomplete or where accepting it would breach a law or a rule that binds the Company.

To run the Services the Company needs a few permissions from you. You grant the Company a worldwide, non-exclusive licence to process the Fleet Records, the Personal Information and the messages you provide, but only to the extent needed to deliver the Services, to support you, to comply with the law and to improve the Services in a way that protects your data.

This licence does not transfer any ownership. Your Fleet Records remain yours before, during and after the service, and nothing in the licence lets the Company sell your data or turn it to a purpose outside the Services.

Suggestions you send about improving the Services are welcome, and by sending them you give the Company a permanent, royalty-free permission to adopt and develop those improvements for all users. This permission does not apply to a private report of a security fault, which the Company treats with its usual confidence.

Keeping your own records right is the customers oldest duty, and the Services cannot fix a log that is wrong at the source. You agree to supply accurate data, to keep passwords and access keys secret, to use the account only for lawful ends, and to tell the Company without delay if an account is lost, borrowed or suspected of misuse.

On the modern bridge, software is a tool and the master bears the duty. You are responsible under your own rules and flag for the decisions your crews take about safety, manning, routing and cargo. The Services display a body of ordered data; they do not absolve you of seamanship, of a ships owners obligations or of any requirement of the port state in which a vessel calls.

You also agree to obtain any consent that the law requires from an individual whose data you load into the Services, so that the Company does not receive personal information by a route that would be wrong under the law.

The Services exist to help a vessel operator run a cleaner watch. They must not be turned to a wrong purpose. You agree not to use the Services to break a law, to send damaging code, to overload or hinder the machinery of the Company or its providers, to scrape public pages beyond a reasonable reading rate, or to seek unapproved entry into an account that is not your own.

You will not resell or lend the Services, or a right under them, to a third party unless the plan you hold plainly allows it. You will not copy, reverse build or extract the source or the design of the Services except where an open licence or the law gives you an express leave to do so.

You will not hold the Services or the Company out as the maker of decisions that are in truth yours, and you will not use the Services to harvest personal information about other people without their agreement.

Fees for the Services are those set out in the order that the account accepted. Fees are stated before the applicable taxes are added, and the taxes themselves are added and shown separately on each invoice as the law of the billing region requires.

Invoices fall due on the date shown, and an account pays by the payment method registered at that time. Where a payment fails, the Company will give the account a reasonable window to correct it before the account is at risk of suspension. Late amounts may carry the interest allowed by law.

Trial and promotional arrangements run at no charge for their stated term, and the Company does not change an agreed fee within a fixed contract term. On renewal the fee may move, but you will receive a clear statement of the new amount in time to decide whether to stay aboard.

Access to the Services runs on named accounts. Each account carries a password or another token of proof, and you hold the duty of guarding that token and of watching the sessions it opens. Multi-factor protection is offered where an account can use it, and the marked administrator should turn it on.

Support is the backbone of a long system life. Paying accounts carry support during the business hours listed on the contact page, and an emergency line handles a live outage or a fault on a vessel under way. Support is answered by a person who can speak to the machinery, never by a voice that cannot understand a fleet log.

When a support ticket is opened, the Company may ask to see the screen and the steps that led to a fault. That material is used only to cure the fault and is not read for any wider purpose. Marked critical tickets are given the most direct route to an engineer.

The design of the Services, the software, the trade names including HMS FREEDOM, the written matter on this site, the charts, the layout and the code all belong to the Company, to the developer HMSFreedom or to their licensors. Your use of the Services does not carry any ownership in that material.

The Company grants you a limited, non-exclusive right to use the Services and the documentation for the purpose your account describes. That right lasts while the subscription runs and ends when the account ends, in line with the section on termination.

Any mark or name that looks like a signal of the Company remains the property of its owner. Nothing in these terms grants you a right to bring the HMS FREEDOM name or any affiliated shorthand into your own marketing without the written leave of the Company.

Your Fleet Records and the personal information of your crew remain your property. The Company does not claim them, does not sell them and returns them or deletes them on the closing of the account according to the schedule in the Privacy Policy.

Both parties keep the confidential material of the other in the strictest confidence, using it only for the purpose of the agreement and guarding it with the same care each would guard its own most valuable records. This duty of confidence survives the end of the agreement.

The Company may speak in public about the classes of work it does, but it will not name a specific vessel, an operator or a port call in that speech unless the operator has agreed to be named or the record has been shown without any identifying detail.

The Company works to keep the Services available and responsive. It gives no promise that the Services are free of interruption, because no honest operator on the public network makes that promise, but the Company does undertake to pursue any fault that a user reports and to communicate openly about its cause and cure.

A maintenance window that the Company can plan is announced in good time so that a fleet office can stand a watch around it. An unplanned outage is investigated promptly, and where the terms of the plan that an account holds set a service credit for downtime, that credit is applied without the customer being made to seek it out.

The figures a dashboard shows are as fresh as the reports feeding them permit, and a short delay between a vessels transmission and its place on the chart is a fact of data moving from the sea, not a shortcoming of the display.

The Services organise the data an operator holds and display it with clarity. They do not render a decision, replace a pilot, command a bridge or issue a lawful instruction to anyone. The Company makes this point plainly so that no one leans on the Services for a duty they should not shoulder.

Anyone who operates a vessel must still obey its master, its flag, its class rules, its insurance conditions and the law of the waters it crosses and the ports it visits. A suggested arrival time or a maintenance note produced by the Services is a planning aid to be checked against the reality of the day, and not a guarantee of a fact in the world.

Where the Services point to external weather, registry or mapping data, that data is supplied by the source named on the chart and carries the limits that source itself declares.

An account may end in several ways. A user may close an account at any time by asking the Company to do so; the closing account settles any outstanding invoice and receives an export of its own records before deletion runs on the set schedule.

The Company may suspend an account, with notice, where an invoice is overdue, where the account is used in a way that breaks these terms or the law, or where the continued running of the account would put the machinery or another user at risk. Where the breach is serious the Company may close the account at once, still giving the user the honest reason for the step.

On any end of an account the user loses access to the Services. Rights under these terms that naturally outlast the account, including the sections on indemnity, limitation of liability, confidentiality and governing law, continue to bind both parties.

The Privacy Policy is a binding part of these terms, and the Company treats a promise about data with the same weight as a clause about money. The two documents are meant to be read together, and where they touch on the same matter they carry the same meaning.

Operational volumes vary widely between seasons, and the deletion and transfer rules in the Privacy Policy apply to a closed account without regard to the reason the account closed. Nothing in these terms forces the Company to hold a record longer than the law or the Privacy Policy allows.

When the Company engages a named Service Provider, the record of that engagement and the duties placed on that provider are described in the Privacy Policy, which also tells you how to reach the office that answers data questions.

To the fullest extent that the law allows, the Services are offered as the basis they stand on, without a promise of a particular result. The Company does not warrant that the Services will meet every need of a specific voyage, trade or working pattern, or that the Services will run without a single fault.

Where the law permits, the Company will not be liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, for lost profit, for lost data or for the cost of a substitute service arising from the use of the Services, even when the Company has been warned that such loss might fall. The aggregate liability of the Company arising out of or relating to the Services in any twelve month period is limited to the sums the account paid to the Company in that same period.

Nothing in these terms removes or limits a liability that cannot be removed or limited under the law where you live, and the limits in this section are drawn to bend before any mandatory rule rather than to fight it.

You agree to hold harmless and defend the Company, its staff, its officers and its agents against any claim, loss, cost or damage that rises out of your use of the Services, your Fleet Records, your breach of these terms or your breach of a right of a third party.

This indemnity reaches a claim that your data or your conduct broke a law, a regulation or a contract, and it extends to the reasonable legal costs of answering that claim. It does not reach a loss caused by a fault that is truly the fault of the Company alone.

Where a claim arrives, the Company will give you prompt notice, will not hand over the conduct of the defence to another without your knowledge, and will reasonably cooperate so that the matter can be settled on terms that suit both parties.

The Services are a working yard, and the Company improves them without pausing the fleet that uses them. The Company may add capability, retire a little-used corner, or move a function between plans, and it will give accounted users a reasonable notice of a change that takes away a function the account relies on.

These terms may be revised in the manner set out in the section on acceptance. The version in force is the version linked from the footer of the site on the day in question, and the Company keeps an internal record of each published version.

A change that lowers a fee or adds a benefit takes effect for every account at once. A change that raises a fee or narrows a feature begins only after notice and only at the next renewal of the subscribing account.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States of America, without regard to its rules on the choice of law. The ordinary courts of the venue described below hold exclusive jurisdiction for a dispute between you and the Company that is not resolved by negotiation.

Before any matter goes to court, both parties agree to attempt a fair settlement in writing. A notice under these terms is valid when sent to the contact email or the address of the receiving party and is deemed received on the day it is sent.

Where a consumer law of the region in which you live grants you rights that these terms cannot set aside, those rights are not touched. This clause is drawn to respect the strongest rule that governs you rather than to push past it.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any order the account accepts, form the whole agreement between you and the Company about the Services, and they replace any prior talk, draft or note on the same subject.

The Company may assign its rights and duties under a services agreement to an affiliated undertaking or to a successor, and will tell you of any such transfer in the manner the section on sharing describes. You may not assign your account without the written leave of the Company, which will not be withheld without a sound reason.

A delay by the Company in enforcing a right does not waive that right, and a single act of forbearance does not turn into a habit. The headings of sections serve only navigation, and a section number never carries a meaning of its own. Where the words of a clause point one way, no external writing can turn them another.

Matters of service, of account and of law should be brought to the same office, and the office answers every channel on the schedule shown on the contact page. The registered addresses of HMS FREEDOM, LLC are below.

A written notice served on the address above is effective the day it is sent either by post or by email. The operations crew answers alerts during business hours, and a marked outage or an urgent maritime matter is routed to the watch so that it is not left to the morning.