First Light Terms of Use

1. About these terms

These terms of use ("Terms") govern your use of the First Light app, including the Cull Diary and Deer School, at firstlightdeer.co.uk and any associated pages ("First Light" or the "app"). By using the app, or by creating a Cull Diary account, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the app.

First Light is an independent project operated by Sohaib Mengal from the United Kingdom ("we", "us"). For any question about these Terms, contact firstlightdeer@gmail.com.

2. What First Light is (and isn't)

First Light is a set of digital tools for UK deer stalkers — legal shooting-time calculators, species information, seasonal calendars, a learning dashboard (Deer School), and the optional Cull Diary for recording your own cull activity. It is intended as a practical aid, not as legal, veterinary, or food-hygiene advice.

The app generates documents such as Trained Hunter Declarations, Game Dealer Consignment Declarations, and Larder Books from the information you enter. These documents record declarations you are making; they are not issued, certified, or endorsed by us. You are responsible for the accuracy of every entry and declaration, and for meeting any regulatory obligations that apply to you (including but not limited to assimilated Regulation (EC) No 853/2004 and the UK Game Regulations).

3. Service availability and changes

First Light is an evolving, independently developed service. This means:

• Features, behaviour, and the user interface may change without notice.
• Bugs, data-display errors, and temporary outages are possible.
• We may add, modify, or remove features, or suspend or discontinue the service (in whole or in part), at any time.
• You should not rely on First Light as the sole record of any legally required information. Keep your own backups where regulation or prudence calls for it — the diary provides CSV, PDF, Season Summary, and Larder Book exports for this purpose.

4. Your account

Some features (the Cull Diary and any syndicate tools) require an account. You agree to:

• Provide accurate information when registering.
• Keep your password secure and not share your account with others.
• Use the app only for lawful purposes related to your own stalking activity — recreational, syndicate, or professional.
• Promptly notify us of any unauthorised access to your account.

You can delete your account and all of your data at any time from inside the diary. See the Privacy Policy for what is retained and for how long.

5. Acceptable use

When using First Light you agree not to:

• Use the app for any unlawful activity, or in a way that would breach UK deer-management law, the Deer Act, the Wildlife and Countryside Act, or firearms legislation.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the app, its database, any other user's account, or any system connected to it.
• Scrape, bulk-download, resell, or redistribute any part of the app, its data, or its content.
• Reverse-engineer the app except where such restriction is prohibited by law.
• Upload content that is unlawful, defamatory, offensive, or that infringes anyone else's rights (including photographs of other people without their consent).
• Use any automated tool, bot, or script to interact with the app beyond what normal browser use requires.
• Attempt to disrupt, overload, or probe the app or the third-party services it depends on (see the Privacy Policy for that list).

6. Your content

You retain ownership of the cull records, notes, and photographs you enter into the Cull Diary ("Your Content"). We do not claim any rights in Your Content and we do not use it to train models, sell to third parties, or advertise. We store and process it only to provide the service to you, as described in the Privacy Policy.

If you choose to share entries with a syndicate you are a member of, Your Content in those entries may be visible to other members of that syndicate, as explained in the diary interface. You are responsible for what you choose to share.

You are solely responsible for Your Content, including its accuracy and its lawfulness. We may remove Your Content or suspend your account if we reasonably believe it violates these Terms or the law.

7. Syndicate tools

The syndicate features let a group of stalkers share entries, targets, and larder/declaration documents under a shared ground filter. If you use these features:

• You are responsible for only inviting people you have the right to share data with.
• A syndicate manager may revoke a member's access or leave the syndicate; accepted entries shared before then may remain visible to the syndicate in line with the diary's behaviour at the time.
• Managers acting on behalf of a syndicate must ensure their members have been told that their data will be visible to other syndicate members.

8. Licence to use the app

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use First Light for your own stalking activity, subject to these Terms. This includes:

• Recreational and syndicate stalking.
• Professional deer management and paid stalking work carried out by you.
• The lawful commercial activities that flow from stalking — in particular selling venison to licensed game dealers, issuing trained-hunter and consignment declarations, and maintaining larder records for food-business or regulatory purposes. The PDFs the app generates are designed for exactly this.

What this licence does not cover, without our prior written permission:

• Reselling access to the app, sublicensing it, or providing it as a hosted service to third parties.
• Using the app to keep records on behalf of other stalkers as a paid data-entry or record-keeping service.
• Using any part of First Light — including its code, design, written content, question bank, or PDF templates/layouts — as the basis of your own product or a competing service.

For clarity, sharing generated declarations and reports as part of your own lawful stalking, dealer, and compliance workflow is permitted under this licence.

The First Light name, branding, design, written content, question bank, PDFs, and source code are the intellectual property of Sohaib Mengal and are protected by UK copyright law. See the Copyright & Ownership section of the Privacy Policy.

9. Third-party services

First Light depends on third-party services (Supabase, Mapbox, Ordnance Survey, Open-Meteo, and others listed in the Privacy Policy) to function. We are not responsible for the availability, accuracy, or terms of those services, and you agree to their own terms and privacy policies when using First Light.

The Field Guide may display the names and logos of independent organisations — including UK Deer Track & Recovery (UKDTR), the British Deer Society (BDS), and the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) — and link to their websites. Those names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners. First Light is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or sponsored by those organisations. We do not control and are not responsible for the content, availability, or policies of third-party sites you open from those links.

10. No warranty

First Light is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that:

• The app will always be available or free of errors or bugs.
• The information it displays (legal shooting times, weather, map tiles, species information, quiz answers, calculated statistics) is accurate, complete, or up to date.
• Any document generated by the app satisfies any specific regulatory or contractual requirement that applies to you.
• The app will be compatible with your device or browser.

You are responsible for verifying anything you rely on for a legal, regulatory, or safety decision.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, First Light, Sohaib Mengal, and anyone involved in creating or hosting First Light will not be liable for:

• Any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss (including loss of data, loss of profits, loss of opportunity, or loss of reputation).
• Any loss arising from your reliance on information displayed or documents generated by the app.
• Any loss caused by a third-party service the app depends on, or by your own internet connectivity.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under UK law.

12. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the app (or the app itself) at any time, with or without notice, including if we reasonably believe you have breached these Terms. You may stop using the app at any time and may delete your account and data from inside the diary.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time as the app evolves. The date at the top of the page will reflect the most recent update. Material changes will be flagged in the app's What's new notes. Continued use of the app after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

14. Governing law

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK you retain the benefit of any mandatory local-law protections that apply to you.

15. Contact

Questions, concerns, or reports of misuse: firstlightdeer@gmail.com.