LandScope Terms of Use

Effective Date: July 8th, 2026
Last Updated: July 8th, 2026

Introduction

Welcome to LandScope!

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of LandScope's terrain analysis platform, including our Python-based automation tools, Digital Elevation Model (DEM) processing services, KMZ generation capabilities, and related features and services (collectively, the "Services").

LandScope provides sophisticated terrain analysis automation that transforms high-resolution Digital Elevation Models into interactive Google Earth Pro overlays, making powerful geospatial data accessible to regenerative designers, environmental consultants, real estate developers, land investors, and other professionals.

By accessing or using our Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree with any part of these Terms, please do not use our Services.

Questions about these Terms? Contact us at [email protected] and we'll be happy to help clarify anything.

Summary of Key Points

This summary highlights key provisions of our Terms of Use, but please read the full document below for complete details.

What Services do we provide?

LandScope offers terrain analysis automation tools that process Digital Elevation Models to generate interactive KMZ map overlays with elevation, slope, contour, hillshade, and hydrology data for Google Earth Pro.

Who can use our Services?

Our Services are designed for professional use by individuals and organizations aged 18 and over, including environmental consultants, designers, developers, researchers, and land management professionals.

What are your responsibilities?

You must provide accurate information, use our Services lawfully, respect intellectual property rights, and maintain the security of your account credentials.

What about your data?

You retain ownership of the data you upload, and we process it according to our Privacy Policy. We may retain anonymized insights to improve our Services.

What are our limitations?

While we strive for accuracy, terrain analysis involves inherent uncertainties. Our Services are tools to assist decision-making but should not be the sole basis for critical decisions.

How can these Terms change?

We may update these Terms periodically. We'll notify you of material changes and give you an opportunity to review them before they take effect.

1. Service Description

1.1 Core Services

LandScope provides automated terrain analysis services that process Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) to generate interactive map overlays and analytical outputs for professional use.

1.2 Fundamental Limitation: "The Map is Not the Territory"

Critical Understanding

"The map is not the territory" is a phrase coined by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American scientist and philosopher. It means that a representation of something (the map) is not the same as the actual thing it represents (the territory).

Our Services provide analytical representations and visualizations of terrain data, but these outputs are not substitutes for actual field conditions, direct observation, or on-site investigation. Our analysis serves as a means to supplement, not replace, direct observation and professional field work.

Users must understand that:

  • All terrain analysis outputs are representations and interpretations of source data
  • These representations may not accurately reflect actual field conditions
  • Direct site investigation and professional verification remain essential
  • Our Services are tools to assist decision-making, not definitive statements about terrain conditions

1.3 Service Limitations

Legal and Technical Constraints:

  • Analysis accuracy is fundamentally limited by source data quality, currency, and resolution
  • Processing capabilities depend on data complexity and system availability
  • Results are analytical interpretations that require professional validation
  • Services are designed to supplement, not replace, professional field investigation and direct observation
  • Not intended for real-time applications, emergency response, or life-safety decisions

2. Account Registration and Eligibility

2.1 Account Creation

To access certain features of our Services, you must create an account by providing:

  • Valid email address
  • Secure password meeting our requirements
  • Organization information (if applicable)
  • Professional context and intended use cases
  • Billing information for paid plans

2.2 Eligibility Requirements

Age and Capacity:

  • You must be at least 18 years old to create an account
  • You must have the legal capacity to enter into binding agreements
  • If registering on behalf of an organization, you must have authority to bind that entity

Professional Use:

  • Our Services are designed for professional, business, research, or educational use
  • Personal hobby use is permitted but with understanding of professional-grade tool complexity
  • Commercial use requires appropriate subscription plans

2.3 Account Security

Your Responsibilities:

  • Maintain confidentiality of your account credentials
  • Use strong, unique passwords and enable two-factor authentication when available
  • Promptly notify us of any unauthorized access or security breaches
  • Ensure all account information remains current and accurate

3. Acceptable Use Policy

3.1 Permitted Uses

You may use our Services for:

  • Professional terrain analysis for legitimate business, research, or educational purposes
  • Environmental consulting and site assessment projects
  • Land development planning and feasibility studies
  • Academic research and educational projects
  • Conservation planning and environmental protection initiatives
  • Risk assessment for natural hazards and land use planning
  • Design and engineering support for site development
  • Investment analysis for real estate and land acquisition

3.2 Prohibited Uses

You may not use our Services for:

Illegal or Harmful Activities:

  • Any unlawful purpose or activity that violates local, state, national, or international laws
  • Military applications, weapons development, or surveillance activities without proper authorization
  • Activities that could harm the environment or public safety
  • Unauthorized surveillance or privacy violations

System Abuse:

  • Attempts to reverse engineer, decompile, or extract our algorithms
  • Automated scraping, crawling, or systematic downloading of content
  • Overloading our systems with excessive requests or resource consumption
  • Attempting to gain unauthorized access to our systems or other users' accounts

Misuse of Data:

  • Processing stolen, misappropriated, or illegally obtained geographic data
  • Sharing or redistributing proprietary terrain analysis results without authorization
  • Using our Services to create competing terrain analysis products
  • Violating intellectual property rights of data providers or third parties

3.3 Fair Usage Policy

Some LandScope plans are described as "unlimited." Unlimited means we do not cap your usage with a fixed quota under normal, good-faith professional use — it does not mean usage without any limits whatsoever. Unlimited plans are provided per workspace and are subject to this Fair Usage Policy.

Workspaces and authorized users: Where your plan includes collaboration features, LandScope is organized around a workspace. A workspace owner may invite others as admins or members (who can run analyses), and may invite project-level collaborators and client viewers with more limited access. People invited through these roles are your "authorized users," and their use of the Services is permitted and expected — collaboration is a feature, not a violation.

Fair use is genuine professional activity by your workspace's authorized users — running analyses for your projects, clients, and research at a human pace, even at high volume during busy periods.

Unfair or abusive use (expanding on the System Abuse restrictions in Section 3.2) includes, but is not limited to:

  • Automated, scripted, or bulk submission of analyses beyond what a person could reasonably perform manually;
  • Sharing login credentials with, or otherwise giving Services access to, anyone who is not an authorized user of your workspace, instead of inviting them through the roles we provide;
  • Reselling, sublicensing, or renting the Services themselves to third parties, or operating a workspace primarily to let unauthorized persons run their own analyses — as distinct from delivering your own analysis results to your clients, which is permitted;
  • Systematically extracting, harvesting, or reconstructing our underlying datasets or outputs, including to build a competing or derivative dataset or service;
  • Usage consistently and substantially disproportionate to the professional activity of your authorized users, or that materially degrades service quality, performance, or availability for other users;
  • Circumventing, or attempting to circumvent, any technical limit, rate control, seat or role assignment, or usage measure.

How we enforce it: Where we reasonably believe usage is unfair or abusive, we take a proportionate, graduated approach. Except where usage poses an immediate risk to our systems, other users, or the integrity of our data, we will ordinarily contact you first. We may then: (a) reach out to agree a reasonable path forward; (b) apply rate limiting or throttling to protect service quality for everyone; (c) require you to move to a plan that better fits your usage; or (d) temporarily suspend or, for serious or repeated cases, terminate access in accordance with Section 12.

We assess fair use reasonably and in good faith, based on patterns of usage rather than isolated spikes. Our goal is to keep "unlimited" genuinely useful for the professionals it is built for — not to penalize heavy but legitimate work.

4. Your Data and Content

4.1 Data Ownership and Rights

Your Rights:

  • You retain all ownership rights to the Digital Elevation Models and geographic data you upload
  • You maintain ownership of analysis results generated from your data
  • You may download, export, or delete your data subject to technical limitations

Our Rights:

  • We require sufficient rights to process your data to provide the requested Services
  • We may retain anonymized, aggregated insights for service improvement
  • We may retain statistical patterns and trends (without identifying information) for research and development

4.2 Data Responsibilities and Privacy

Your use of our Services is subject to our Privacy Policy, which provides detailed information about:

  • How we collect, use, and protect your data
  • Your privacy rights and choices
  • Data retention and deletion procedures
  • International data transfer protections
  • Contact information for privacy-related inquiries

Please review our Privacy Policy for complete details about our data handling practices.

4.3 User Responsibilities

Your Obligations:

  • Ensure you have legal rights to upload and process all data
  • Comply with any third-party licensing terms applicable to your data
  • Respect privacy rights and obtain necessary consents for location data processing
  • Provide accurate information about data sources and any processing restrictions

5. Intellectual Property Rights

5.1 LandScope Intellectual Property

Our Ownership:

  • Synoptic Solutions Inc. (DBA LandScope) owns all rights to our software, algorithms, analysis methods, and technological processes
  • Our trademarks, service marks, logos, and brand elements are our exclusive property
  • The user interface, design elements, and overall platform architecture are protected by copyright
  • Our terrain analysis methodologies and computational approaches are proprietary

Your License to Use:

  • We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use our Services
  • Your license is subject to these Terms and payment of applicable fees
  • You may not sublicense, distribute, or create derivative works based on our technology
  • Commercial use requires appropriate subscription plans and licensing

5.2 User-Generated Content

Analysis Results:

  • You own the analysis results and visualizations generated from your data
  • We do not claim copyright in the specific outputs created for your projects
  • You may use, modify, and distribute your results subject to any underlying data restrictions
  • Professional and commercial use of results is permitted within your license terms

6. Payment Terms and Billing

6.1 Pricing Structure

Cost-Per-Map Model:

  • Services are billed on a per-analysis basis for each terrain analysis request
  • Pricing varies based on the size, complexity, and processing requirements of the submitted DEM
  • Final pricing is determined after initial data assessment and confirmed before processing begins
  • No recurring subscription fees or monthly charges

6.2 Payment Process

Order and Payment Flow:

  • Pricing quote provided after data submission and initial assessment
  • Payment required before processing begins
  • Processing commences only after successful payment confirmation
  • Completed analysis delivered upon successful processing

6.3 Refund Policy

  • Full refunds available if processing cannot be completed due to technical issues on our end
  • Partial refunds may be considered if delivered results do not meet specified technical requirements
  • No refunds for completed analyses that meet technical specifications
  • Quality issues must be reported within 30 days of delivery

7. Service Availability and Performance

7.1 Service Level Expectations

Uptime Commitment:

  • We strive to maintain 99% uptime for our core processing services
  • Planned maintenance will be scheduled during low-usage periods when possible
  • Emergency maintenance may be performed without advance notice
  • Service status and incident reports are available on our status page

7.2 Technical Support

Support Channels:

  • Email support available at [email protected] for all users
  • Documentation, tutorials, and FAQ resources available online
  • Priority support for professional and enterprise subscribers
  • Community forums for user discussions and knowledge sharing

8. Disclaimers and Limitations

8.1 Nature of Terrain Analysis

Inherent Limitations: Terrain analysis involves inherent uncertainties and limitations that users must understand:

  • Data Quality Dependency: Analysis accuracy is fundamentally limited by the quality, resolution, and currency of input DEM data
  • Interpolation Effects: All terrain models involve interpolation and mathematical approximations that may not perfectly represent actual conditions
  • Scale Sensitivity: Analysis results may vary significantly depending on the scale and resolution of analysis
  • Temporal Limitations: DEMs represent terrain conditions at a specific point in time and may not reflect current conditions

8.2 Hydrological and Water Layer Limitations

Water-related layers are modeled approximations, not surveyed hydrology: Our water and drainage-related outputs — including the drainage layer, flow accumulation, and the Topographic Wetness Index (TWI) — are computed mathematically from the Digital Elevation Model (DEM). They estimate how water would move across the bare-earth surface and do not measure real-world water behavior. Their accuracy is subject to important limitations:

  • Man-made conveyances are not represented: DEMs do not capture culverts, storm drains, pipes, tile drains, ditches, and similar sub-surface or engineered drainage infrastructure. Where such features carry water in reality, the modeled flow paths will not reflect it.
  • Elevation artifacts distort flow: Features such as bridges, road and rail embankments, and dense vegetation can appear in the DEM as solid barriers or raised mounds ("digital dams"). This can cause the model to pond, divert, or misroute water where, in reality, water passes freely — for example, a bridge that the DEM records as an obstruction.
  • Derived layers inherit these errors: Because flow accumulation, the Topographic Wetness Index, and the drainage layer are all derived from the same elevation surface, any such artifact or omission propagates into all of them.
  • Verify before you rely on them: These layers are decision-support models intended to inform and prioritise your work — including drainage, flood, and site-planning assessments — not to serve as final, survey-grade determinations. Before relying on them for design, permitting, or other consequential decisions, confirm the results against field observation and, where appropriate, a professional survey, hydrological or hydraulic assessment, and official flood-hazard data. Like any model, these layers are an approximation of reality; we work to make them as useful as possible, but responsibility for verifying actual conditions on the ground remains with you.

8.3 Dynamic Nature of Terrain

Terrain is dynamic and constantly changing:

  • Earthworks and Development: Any earthworks, construction, excavation, grading, or development activities that have occurred since the original data acquisition date will not be reflected in our analysis
  • Natural Changes: Erosion, landslides, flooding, vegetation growth, and other natural processes may have altered terrain since data collection
  • Currency of Source Data: We process the latest available LiDAR data through open data sources, but this does not guarantee that it captures present-day topography
  • Field verification is essential to confirm current conditions

8.4 Service Availability Disclaimers

Services are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis without warranties of any kind, including:

  • Continuous, uninterrupted, or error-free operation
  • Compatibility with all hardware, software, or data formats
  • Meeting specific performance requirements or deadlines
  • Freedom from viruses, security vulnerabilities, or other harmful components

9. Limitation of Liability

9.1 Types of Damages Excluded

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LANDSCOPE SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR:

Indirect and Consequential Damages:

  • Lost profits, business opportunities, or revenue
  • Business interruption or operational delays
  • Loss of data, information, or work product
  • Cost of substitute services or replacement analysis
  • Damage to professional reputation or client relationships

9.2 Damage Caps

Maximum Liability Limit:

  • Our total liability for any claims arising from or related to these Terms or our Services shall not exceed the amount you paid to LandScope in the 12 months preceding the claim
  • For free tier users, our maximum liability shall not exceed $100 USD
  • These limitations apply regardless of the legal theory of the claim (contract, tort, strict liability, etc.)

10. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless LandScope, its officers, directors, employees, agents, and affiliates from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs, or debt, and expenses (including attorney's fees) arising from:

  • Your use of unauthorized, infringing, or illegal data or content
  • Violations of third-party intellectual property rights in connection with data you upload
  • Your violation of these Terms of Use or our Acceptable Use Policy
  • Your use of our Services for illegal, harmful, or unauthorized purposes
  • Claims by your clients, customers, or business partners related to analysis results

11. Privacy and Data Protection

These Terms incorporate our Privacy Policy by reference. Privacy and data protection obligations are detailed in our separate Privacy Policy document.

Key Privacy Commitments:

  • We do not sell or rent your personal information or proprietary data
  • Data processing is limited to providing Services and improving our platform
  • Security measures protect data during processing, storage, and transmission
  • User rights regarding data access, correction, and deletion are respected

12. Termination

12.1 Termination by User

You may cancel your account at any time through your account dashboard. Data export capabilities will remain available for 30 days after cancellation.

12.2 Termination by LandScope

We may terminate your account immediately for:

  • Material breach of these Terms that remains uncured after 30 days' notice
  • Violation of our Acceptable Use Policy
  • Non-payment of fees after appropriate notice and opportunity to cure
  • Fraudulent activity or misuse of our Services
  • Legal requirements or court orders

13. Dispute Resolution

13.1 Informal Resolution

Before pursuing formal dispute resolution, parties agree to:

  • Communicate directly about the nature of the dispute and potential solutions
  • Allow 30 days for good faith negotiations to resolve the matter
  • Consider mediation or other alternative dispute resolution methods

13.2 Binding Arbitration

Disputes that cannot be resolved informally will be settled through binding arbitration under the Commercial Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association.

13.3 Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the laws of Alberta, Canada without regard to conflict of law principles. Court proceedings for non-arbitrable claims will be held in Alberta, Canada.

14. Geographic Restrictions

14.1 Service Availability Based on Data Sources

LiDAR Data Availability:

  • Our Services are primarily available in regions where LiDAR data is accessible through open data sources
  • LiDAR coverage varies significantly by country and region
  • We cannot provide terrain analysis services in areas where suitable elevation data is not available

Alternative Data Sources:

  • In regions where LiDAR data is not available, we may be able to process drone-derived Digital Elevation Models
  • Drone-derived DEMs require users to provide their own data collected through appropriate UAV surveys
  • Users are responsible for ensuring drone data collection complies with local aviation regulations and airspace restrictions

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms periodically to reflect changes in our Services, legal requirements, or business practices. Material changes will be communicated with at least 30 days' advance notice through:

  • Email notification to registered users
  • Account dashboard notifications
  • Website postings

Continued use of our Services after the effective date constitutes acceptance of updated Terms.

16. Contact Information

For questions about these Terms of Use, our Services, or your account:

Email: [email protected]

By using LandScope, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms of Use.