Open Hearts — Terms of Use

The short version

• Playing alone is free No account, no ads, nothing to buy, and we have no plans to change that.
• Live play is a yearly subscription It renews automatically every year until you cancel. Cancel whenever you like, and live play lasts to the end of the year you have paid for.
• Be decent at the table Choose a name and picture you would show anyone, and do not cheat or harass.
• The code is yours too It is MIT licensed. These terms are about the service we run, not about what you may do with the code.

Who these terms are with

These terms are an agreement between you and Bright Fulton LLC, the South Carolina limited liability company that runs Open Hearts and whose address is under Contact ("Open Hearts", "we", "us"). They cover this site, the game at play.openhearts.game, the Open Hearts apps for phones, and the live-play service. By using any of them you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use them.

How we handle information about you is described in the privacy policy. It is a separate document, not part of these terms, and it changes when what the app does with data changes.

Age

Anyone may play alone. You must be at least 13 years old to play live. If you are under 18, you may subscribe only with the agreement of a parent or guardian, who accepts these terms on your behalf and is responsible for the subscription.

If you got the app from the App Store

If you got Open Hearts from Apple's App Store, these terms are its end user licence agreement, in place of Apple's standard one, and the following also applies:

1. These terms are between you and us, not Apple. We, not Apple, are solely responsible for the app and what is in it.
2. Your licence to the app is a non-transferable licence to use it on any Apple-branded product that you own or control, as the Usage Rules in Apple's Media Services Terms and Conditions allow, except that other accounts linked to the purchaser's through Family Sharing or volume purchasing may use it too.
3. We alone are responsible for maintaining and supporting the app. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for it.
4. If the app fails to conform to a warranty that applies to it and is not effectively disclaimed, you may tell Apple, and Apple will refund what you paid for the app, if anything. To the extent the law allows, Apple has no other warranty obligation for the app, and any other claim, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense that comes from such a failure is ours alone to answer for.
5. We, not Apple, are responsible for answering any claim by you or anyone else about the app or your having or using it, including claims of product liability, claims that the app fails to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims under consumer protection, privacy or similar laws.
6. If anyone claims that the app, or your having or using it, infringes their intellectual property rights, we, not Apple, are solely responsible for investigating, defending, settling and discharging the claim.
7. You confirm that you are not in a country that is subject to a US Government embargo or that the US Government has designated as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
8. Questions, complaints and claims about the app go to us, at the address under Contact.
9. When you use the app, you must keep to the terms of anyone else that apply, such as your wireless data service agreement.
10. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and once you accept them, Apple has the right to enforce them against you as a third-party beneficiary.

Anything you buy in the App Store is billed, renewed, cancelled and refunded by Apple, under Apple's own terms.

If you got it from Google Play, Google Play's terms apply to the download and to anything bought there in the same way.

Playing alone

Playing against the bots is free, needs no account, and has no ads or purchases in it. We do not promise to keep any particular version of it running, but the code is open, so anyone can.

The live-play subscription

What it includes

• Being seated at a table with other subscribers who are waiting, with bots in the seats nobody takes.
• Tables of your own, with a link to send to friends who also subscribe.
• Rated games, and a rating worked out from the results our server signs for each game.
• The services that make a table work: putting players in touch with each other, the relay that carries a table's moves and keeps them in order, and the server that plays the bots' seats.
• Up to five of your devices on one subscription, added and dropped by you.

Everyone at a live table has subscribed. Live play needs an internet connection; what it shares, and with whom, is in the privacy policy. We do our best to keep it working, but we cannot promise that it always will, or that a particular game will finish.

Price and length

A subscription lasts one year. On the web it costs $5.99 a year in US dollars, or the same in your currency at checkout, paid up front, plus any tax where you live, shown at checkout. In the App Store or Google Play the price is the one the store shows you, in your currency, before you buy.

Automatic renewal

A subscription renews automatically every year, at the price then in force, and is charged to the same payment method, until you cancel it. If the price of a web subscription changes, the new price applies to yours only from a renewal we have told you of by email, at least 7 and at most 30 days before it. In the App Store or Google Play, the store tells you of a new price under its own rules.

• App Store: payment is charged to your Apple Account when you confirm the purchase. The subscription renews unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current year, and your account is charged for the renewal within the 24 hours before that.
• Google Play: renewal and charging follow Google Play's rules, shown when you buy.
• Web: you buy the subscription from Link (Sold through Link, LLC), Stripe's affiliate, which sells it for us under its purchase terms, collects any tax, and charges the payment method you gave it each year on the date you first subscribed; your card statement shows LINK.COM with our name. Before you pay, the checkout asks you to agree to these terms, and says that by subscribing you authorize Link to charge you for it until you cancel. Link sends your receipts and a reminder before each renewal, and we email you what you bought, how it renews and how to cancel. What you buy is live play, under these terms.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time. Cancelling stops the next renewal; live play keeps working until the end of the year you have paid for.

How to cancel — in the app, in each store, and when you no longer have any of your devices — is on the support page.

Refunds

• App Store: refunds are Apple's to give, under its own policies: ask for one at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot refund an App Store purchase ourselves.
• Google Play: ask Google, under its policies, or contact us: we can refund a Google Play purchase ourselves.
• Web: contact us, or Link. If you live in the EU or the UK, you may cancel the purchase within 14 days of it, under Link's purchase terms. Anywhere, a right the law where you live gives you to withdraw from the purchase or to a refund is yours, and we will look fairly at any other request.

A refund ends the subscription, whoever gives it, Link included: it is not renewed again, and live play on its devices stops at the end of the day it ends (in UTC). For a purchase in a store, that is the day the store tells us of the refund.

Your devices

Subscribing makes an account, and the subscription and its devices belong to it. There is no password, and the account plays live on one device at a time: opening the game on another of its devices moves live play there, and a game left on the first counts as one you left. If you clear the game's data or delete the app on your only device in the account, bring the new one in with a backup code, or, if you signed in with Apple or Google, by signing in the same way again. Or contact us with the email address you paid with on the web, and we will help where we can. You are responsible for the devices you bring into your account and for what is done in live play from them, so bring in only your own, and drop one you no longer have.

At a live table

Your name and picture are public at a live table, as the privacy policy sets out. Do not put anything in them that you would not want a stranger to see.

You agree not to:

• use a name or picture that is hateful, sexual, violent, harassing or illegal, or that infringes someone else's rights;
• pretend to be another person, or to be us;
• harass, threaten or abuse other players;
• cheat: share cards with another player, play several seats at one table, or alter the game to gain an advantage;
• attack, overload or try to break the service, the relays or other players' devices, or abuse them, for example by flooding them or by using them to carry or store anything but the game's own traffic.

Reading what the relay publishes and working out ratings from it are welcome, and so is looking for security problems in good faith and reporting them as our security policy asks.

A player who stops playing can be booted by the table, and a bot takes the seat. A player who leaves a rated game finishes it last. You can hide another player's picture on your own device at any time, or block them: then their name, picture and reactions are not shown on your device.

To report a player or a picture, hold their name at the table and choose Report, or contact us (below). Pictures are also checked automatically as they are published, and one that seems to break these rules is hidden at once; if you think yours was hidden by mistake, contact us. If a device or an account breaks these rules, we may remove its name or picture, suspend it from live play at once, and stop issuing its devices the licences live play needs. A suspended account's web subscription does not renew while the suspension lasts. If we suspend an account without a good reason, we will refund the unused part of a web subscription. We may also end an account, as Ending these terms says.

What you publish

Your name, icon, colour and picture, and the records and results of the games you play, are yours. So that live play can work, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, copy, publish and pass them on through our service and relay, and to show them to other players and to anyone who reads the relay, as the privacy policy describes, for as long as it says they are kept. You confirm that you have the right to use any picture you choose, and that what you publish breaks no one else's rights.

Copyright

If you believe that something published through Open Hearts, such as a player's name or picture, infringes your copyright, send a notice to our copyright agent:

Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the notice must include:

• your physical or electronic signature, as the copyright owner or someone authorized to act for them;
• the copyrighted work you say is infringed;
• the material you say infringes it, and enough for us to find it, such as the player's name and where you saw it;
• your name, address, telephone number and email address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law;
• a statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or authorized to act for them.

When a notice is complete, we remove the material or disable access to it promptly, and tell the person who published it.

If something you published was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the same agent. It must include:

• your physical or electronic signature;
• the material that was removed, and where it appeared before it was;
• a statement, under penalty of perjury, that you believe in good faith that it was removed by mistake or misidentification;
• your name, address and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district where your address is (or, outside the United States, any district where we may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice, or their agent.

We send a complete counter-notice to the person who sent the notice, and put the material back 10 to 14 business days after we receive it, unless they tell us first that they have filed a court action to stop the infringement.

We end live play for a device or account that repeatedly infringes copyright. A notice or counter-notice that knowingly misrepresents something can make its sender liable for damages.

The code, and the name

The source code of Open Hearts is published under the MIT licence, and you may use, change and share it as that licence allows. That licence is about the code. It does not give you access to our live-play service, which these terms cover, and a game built from a copy of the code is its builder's, not ours. Please do not call a modified copy "Open Hearts" in a way that would make people think it comes from us.

No warranty

OPEN HEARTS IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE". TO THE EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

In plain words: beyond the promises in these terms, we do not promise that Open Hearts will be free of bugs or interruptions, that it will suit a particular purpose, or that servers run by other people will keep or delete anything.

Limits on our liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, or for lost data, arising from your use of Open Hearts, and our total liability to you for anything arising from it is limited to what you paid us for live play in the twelve months before the claim, or five US dollars if that is more.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for fraud, for intentional misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any other liability that the law does not let us limit or exclude, and nothing in them takes away rights you have under consumer law that cannot be taken away by agreement.

Ending these terms

You can stop using Open Hearts at any time, and cancel a subscription as described above. You can also delete your account in the app: its live play ends at once, a web subscription is cancelled with it without a refund of the time left, and one bought in the App Store or Google Play has to be cancelled in the store. If we ever stop offering live play for good, we will stop renewals, say so here and in the app beforehand, and refund the unused part of any web subscription. Subscriptions bought in the App Store or Google Play are refunded under the store's rules. Interruptions, outages and maintenance are not stopping live play, and do not earn a refund.

We may end your account, stopping its live play for good and ending its subscription, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, or if the law requires us to. We then refund the unused part of a web subscription, unless we ended the account for a serious breach, such as cheating, harassment, illegal content or fraud. A subscription bought in Google Play is cancelled and refunded under Google's rules. One bought in the App Store can be cancelled only by you, in the App Store, and is refunded by Apple, under its rules.

Law and disputes

Before either of us takes a dispute to court, we try for 30 days to settle it by email: please write to us first. Most problems can be put right that way.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of South Carolina, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. A dispute we cannot settle between us is heard only in the state courts of Charleston County, South Carolina, including its magistrates' courts for small claims, or in the federal court in Charleston, and you and we both agree that those courts may hear it.

Claims are brought only individually. You and we may each bring a claim against the other only on our own behalf, not as part of a class action or any other representative action, and a court may not join your claim with anyone else's unless we both agree. There is no arbitration: a dispute goes to the courts named above.

If you live where the law gives you the right to bring a claim in your own courts, or protects you more than these terms do, as consumer law does in the European Union and the United Kingdom, that right and that protection still apply.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. Before a change that matters to subscribers applies, we tell them of it: by email, to the address a web subscription was paid with, and in the app. It applies to your subscription from its first renewal at least 30 days after we tell you of it, not in the middle of a year already paid for, unless the law requires it to apply sooner or it is needed to keep the service or its players safe, and then we say so when we tell you. Any other change, such as clearer wording, applies once it is published here. The date at the top is the day this version was published, and earlier versions of this page are kept in the project's history on GitHub. These terms are also offered in other languages; where a translation differs from this English version, the English version applies.

General

If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest of them still applies.

We may transfer these terms, with our rights and duties under them, to someone who takes over running Open Hearts; your rights under them stay the same. You may not transfer yours without our agreement.

We send you notices by email, to the address a web subscription was paid with, or in the app. Send yours to us at the email or postal address under Contact.

Contact

Email help@openhearts.game, or write to:

Bug reports are welcome as issues at github.com/bfulton/open-hearts/issues, which are public. More help is on the support page.