Legal

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account. If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian's permission. Accounts found to belong to children under 13 are removed.

One person, one account. Do not share credentials, and do not register on someone else's behalf.

You keep full copyright in everything you upload. Nothing here transfers ownership of your work.

By posting, you grant The 406: Montana a limited, non-exclusive, revocable licence to store, resize and display your photographs for the purpose of operating the service — showing them in feeds, on profiles and in albums. That licence ends when you delete the photograph or your account, except for copies already cached, or held for a short time in the operational snapshots kept by the infrastructure providers, until those expire.

You confirm you made the photograph, or otherwise hold the rights to publish it, and that publishing it here does not break anyone else's rights, contract or model release.

Sexual content involving minors, in any form, real or generated. This is reported to the authorities, not just removed.

Non-consensual intimate imagery, content that sexualises children, and material that identifies or targets someone for harassment.

Content that incites violence, promotes self-harm, or advertises illegal goods and services.

Work that is not yours, posted without permission. Repeated copyright infringement ends an account.

Automated posting, scraping, bulk account creation, or attempts to probe, overload or bypass the security of the service.

Photographs are stored as you upload them, which means embedded EXIF metadata — camera, lens, exposure, and in some cases GPS coordinates — is preserved in the original file.

The 406: Montana never reads GPS tags and never displays coordinates. But if your camera or phone wrote them into the file, they remain in the file you uploaded. Strip location data before uploading if you do not want it there. This matters most for photographs taken at home or at a nest, den or other sensitive site.

The location field on a post is free text you type yourself. Be as vague as you want.

NO TOLERANCE. There is no tolerance for objectionable content or for abusive behaviour on The 406: Montana. Content that breaks the rules above is removed, and accounts that post it or that harass, threaten or target other people lose access. This is not a warning system to be worked through — a serious first offence ends an account on the first offence.

EVERY REPORT IS REVIEWED WITHIN 24 HOURS. Reports are read by a person and acted on within one day of arriving. Where content is unlawful or someone is at risk it comes down as soon as it is seen, without waiting on the rest of that window. You are not told the outcome of a report you filed about someone else's account, because what happens to another person's account is not yours to be told.

Every photograph, comment, status and account carries a Report option. Reports go to a queue that a person reads. Reporting is private: the account you report is never told who reported it, and reporters are not told who else reported the same thing.

Blocking is separate and immediate. Blocking someone hides the two of you from each other straight away, without waiting on a review, and it removes any follows between you. Nobody is told they have been blocked.

Content that breaks these terms is removed. Accounts that break them can be suspended: a suspended account can still be read, but cannot post, comment, follow or edit — nothing is deleted by suspension alone.

Content may be removed without notice where it is unlawful or poses a risk to someone. Where notice is practical, you will be told what was removed and why.

Sexual content involving minors is reported to the authorities and the account is removed, not suspended.

Urgent reports, legal notices and copyright complaints can be sent directly to cosmanophotography@gmail.com. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first — this service is not monitored around the clock.

If you believe a photograph here is yours and was posted without permission, send a notice and it will be acted on. The form is at /legal/copyright, and notices can also go to cosmanophotography@gmail.com.

A valid notice has to identify you, identify the work, say where it is on The 406: Montana, and include two statements: that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised, and that the information is accurate. Those are requirements of the law, not paperwork — an incomplete notice cannot be acted on as a formal takedown.

If your photograph is removed and you believe that was wrong, you can send a counter-notice saying so. Where a counter-notice is valid, the material may be restored.

REPEAT INFRINGEMENT ENDS AN ACCOUNT. Each notice that is upheld is recorded against the account that posted the work. Accounts that accumulate upheld notices are terminated, and that is a policy applied rather than a sentence written down.

DESIGNATED AGENT. Notices under 17 U.S.C. §512 should be addressed to the designated agent registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Until that registration is completed, cosmanophotography@gmail.com is the address for copyright correspondence and notices sent there will be acted on.

If a photograph, comment or wall post of yours is removed, or your account is suspended, you are told: an alert arrives saying what was done and the reason recorded for it.

You can appeal that decision once, from the notice itself. A person reads appeals. Where an appeal succeeds the decision is reversed and, where the material still exists, it is restored.

You are not told who made the decision. Moderation on a service this size is done by one or two people, and naming them turns a disagreement about a photograph into a problem for somebody's safety.

You can delete your account from Account and security, at any time, without asking anyone. Deleting it removes your profile, photographs, albums, statuses, comments, likes, follows and notifications, and deletes the image files from storage.

Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. Keep your own originals before you do it — any copies still sitting in a provider's operational snapshot age out on that provider's schedule, and are not retrievable by you or by us in the meantime.

You do not need the app installed to do it. /legal/delete-account is a public page, readable without signing in, that says what deletion removes and how to ask for it by email if you cannot get into your account.

A paid plan buys a private vault: your original files, stored exactly as you uploaded them, at full resolution with their metadata intact. Nothing in the vault is re-compressed, and nothing in it is public.

What is promised. Files are held on redundant storage. A SHA-256 fingerprint is recorded when each file arrives and checked when it leaves, so a damaged file is reported rather than handed back as though it were fine. You can download anything you have stored, at any time, in its original form.

What is not promised. No service is a substitute for a copy you control. Keep a local backup as well — the sensible arrangement is three copies, on two kinds of media, one of them somewhere else. A vault is one of those copies, not all three.

If you stop paying, nothing is deleted. The vault becomes read-only: uploads stop, and everything already stored stays exactly where it is and stays downloadable. Files are never removed for non-payment, and never will be. Only you can delete what you have stored, by deleting individual files or by deleting your account.

Plans renew until cancelled. Payment is taken by Apple or Google, and cancellation is done through the App Store or Google Play, not here. Refunds are handled under their policies.

Storage is for photographs. The vault will not accept other kinds of file, and space is for your own work, not for redistributing someone else's.

Beyond the specific commitments made about paid storage above, the service is provided as-is, and there is no guarantee of uptime.

Photographs posted to the feed on a free account are not covered by those commitments. They are stored well and served reliably, but the durability promise applies to the vault.

To the extent the law allows, The 406: Montana is not liable for lost income or indirect damages arising from your use of the service.

These terms can change. Material changes come with a new version number, and you may be asked to accept them again before posting.

The version you accepted at signup is recorded on your account.