The agreement is between you and Tommy Bergeron. Apple is not a party to it.
| Matter | Responsible party |
|---|---|
| The app working, and support for it | Us |
| Payment, billing, refunds, subscription management | Apple |
| Everything you import, and the right to it | You, alone |
| Contents of the Free Books catalogue | Project Gutenberg |
| Whether a free book is public domain where you live | You |
| Content of web articles you save | The site that published them |
| Claims that the app infringes someone's IP | Us |
| Backing up your own library | You |
These terms are a binding agreement between you and Tommy Bergeron, of Quebec, Canada, referred to here as “we” or “us”. They govern your use of the Strophe app for iOS.
You and we acknowledge that this agreement is concluded between the two of us only, and not with Apple. We, not Apple, are solely responsible for Strophe and its content. Your use of Strophe must also comply with the App Store Terms of Service that already apply to you.
By downloading or using Strophe, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the app.
We grant you a personal, non-transferable licence to use Strophe on any Apple-branded device that you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the App Store Terms of Service. Where those Usage Rules allow it, you may use Strophe on devices shared through Family Sharing or volume purchasing.
You may not sell, rent, sublicense, or redistribute the app, or attempt to extract its source code except where the law expressly permits it despite this limitation.
Strophe is free to download and free to use. Reading, listening, every narration voice, web articles, pasted text, highlights, notes and statistics carry no charge and no limit.
Without a subscription you may hold five unique books, counting EPUB and PDF imports only. Strophe Plus removes that limit and adds Instapaper library import.
This is the commitment that matters most, so we state it as a term rather than a promise in marketing copy: if your subscription lapses, expires, or is cancelled, every book already in your library stays there. Nothing is locked, hidden, downgraded, or deleted. You keep reading and listening to all of it, and you keep your highlights and notes.
What a lapsed subscription stops is adding new books beyond the free five, and starting a new Instapaper import.
The Free Books tab browses the catalogue of Project Gutenberg, an independent volunteer project that publishes ebooks whose copyright has expired. We are not affiliated with Project Gutenberg, we do not host these books, and we do not charge for them. Strophe requests them from gutenberg.org on your behalf and saves the file to your library.
Project Gutenberg publishes works that are in the public domain in the United States. Copyright terms differ from country to country, and a work that is free to read in one place may still be protected in another. You are responsible for knowing whether a given work is free to read where you live. The catalogue says as much where you browse it, and we repeat it here because it is the one part of Free Books that is genuinely your call.
Stated plainly because the tab's name invites the opposite assumption: a book downloaded from Free Books is a book in your library, and it occupies one of the five slots a reader gets without Strophe Plus. “Free” describes the book, which costs nothing and carries no licence fee, not the slot it occupies. Once your five are used, adding another from this catalogue asks you to subscribe, exactly as importing your own file would.
Strophe Plus is sold as a monthly or yearly auto-renewing subscription, or as a one-time lifetime purchase. Prices are shown in the app in your local currency before you buy, and are set in App Store Connect rather than here.
All payments are processed by Apple. We never receive or see your payment details. Refunds are requested from and granted by Apple under the App Store Terms of Service, and we have no ability to issue one ourselves. Where a statutory right of cancellation or reimbursement applies to you, that right is unaffected by anything in this section.
If we ever change the price of a subscription, Apple will ask for your consent before the new price is charged, and you may cancel instead.
Apple retries the payment, and you keep full Strophe Plus access during a three-day grace period while it does. Nothing changes for you in those three days: you can still add books and start Instapaper imports.
If the payment still does not go through by the end of that period, the subscription ends and Plus features stop. Your library is untouched, exactly as described above, and resubscribing restores Plus immediately.
Everything you import into Strophe remains yours. We claim no ownership of it and no licence over it. As the Privacy Policy explains, the app has no server and we have no technical means of seeing, collecting, or receiving any of it.
Your library is stored as ordinary files on your device and, if you enable it, in your own iCloud account. You are responsible for keeping your own backups. Deleting the app, or deleting Strophe's iCloud data, removes that content, and we cannot recover it for you.
Ownership runs both ways. You are solely responsible for everything you import into Strophe and for what you do with it: whether you hold the rights to it, whether importing, reading, or listening to it is lawful where you are, and whether it complies with these terms.
Neither we nor Apple are responsible or liable for content you import. We do not host it, receive it, review it, screen it, moderate it, endorse it, or back it up. Because Strophe has no server, we have no technical ability to do any of those things even if we wished to, and nothing you import ever passes through us. Apple has no involvement with it whatsoever.
To the extent the law allows, you agree to hold us and Apple harmless from any third-party claim, demand, loss, or cost arising out of material you import into Strophe or the use you make of it.
Strophe is a reader for material you already have the right to read, and you are responsible for that right. The one exception is the Free Books catalogue, covered in the section below, where the books are supplied through the app.
It is a general-purpose reading tool, in the same sense as a PDF viewer or a text editor. It is not designed, marketed, or intended for use with unlawful material, and we neither encourage nor assist any such use. We have no obligation to monitor what you import, and no ability to do so: nothing you import is transmitted to us, and there is no server on which it could be inspected. We therefore have no knowledge of what any reader's library contains.
If you use Strophe in breach of these terms, your licence to use it ends. Since the app runs entirely on your device, that is a limit on your right to use it rather than something we can enforce technically, and it does not change who bears responsibility for the material involved.
You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a United States Government embargo or designated as a terrorist-supporting country, and that you are not listed on any United States Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
We are solely responsible for providing any maintenance and support for Strophe. Apple has no obligation whatsoever to furnish any maintenance or support services for the app.
For help, write to info@brainpad.org. We do not promise a particular response time, and we may change, suspend, or discontinue features. Should Strophe ever be discontinued, your library remains readable on your device and in your own iCloud, because it is stored as ordinary files that do not depend on us.
Except where the law says otherwise, Strophe is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind.
In the event of any failure of Strophe to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price to you. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Apple will have no other warranty obligation whatsoever with respect to Strophe. Any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses attributable to a failure to conform to a warranty are our responsibility, not Apple's.
Nothing here excludes a legal warranty you hold that cannot be excluded by contract. Under Quebec's Consumer Protection Act in particular, certain warranties of quality and fitness apply regardless of what this document says, and those rights remain yours.
To the extent the law allows, our total liability arising out of your use of Strophe is limited to the amount you paid for it in the twelve months before the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost data where you had the ability to keep a backup.
Some jurisdictions, Quebec among them, do not allow a consumer's rights to be limited in this way. Where that is so, this section applies only as far as the law permits, and your statutory rights are untouched.
This section is about the Strophe app itself: the software we wrote and distribute. It is not about the books, articles, or documents you put into it. Responsibility for those is yours and is set out under “Your books stay yours” above, and nothing in this section moves it.
With that scope, and as Apple requires us to state: we, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim by you or a third party relating to the Strophe app, or your possession and use of the app, including product liability claims, any claim that the app fails to conform to a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims arising under consumer protection, privacy, or similar legislation, including in connection with the app's use of any framework for handling purchases.
In the event of any third-party claim that the Strophe app itself, or your possession and use of the app, infringes that party's intellectual property rights, we, not Apple, are solely responsible for the investigation, defence, settlement and discharge of that claim. A claim about material you imported is not a claim about the app, and is not covered by this paragraph.
The Strophe app, its name, and its design are ours. The books and articles you read through it are not.
You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using Strophe, including the terms of any website whose articles you save.
Apple and Apple's subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and upon your acceptance of them Apple will have the right, and is deemed to have accepted the right, to enforce these terms against you as a third-party beneficiary.
Strophe includes open-source components used under their respective licences. Those licences continue to govern those components.
These terms are governed by the laws of Quebec and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Quebec have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the place where you live, including your right to bring proceedings there.
If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
If we change these terms, the effective date at the top changes with them, and the current version always lives at this address. Continuing to use Strophe after a change means you accept it. If you do not, stop using the app and cancel any subscription.
Questions or complaints: info@brainpad.org.