Licenses, TOS and Disclaimers

License and Copyright

Articles and Posts

As noted at the bot­tom of every page of this site, unless oth­er­wise spec­i­fied I hold the copy­right to all con­tent pre­sented here; and I’m licens­ing it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. What this means in sim­ple terms is that you are free to repro­duce my con­tent; pro­vided that you pro­vide proper attri­bu­tion (ide­ally includ­ing a link back here), you are not using the con­tent in a com­mer­cial con­text (more on this in a bit) and that you are not pro­duc­ing a deriv­a­tive work from my content.

Regarding the “non­com­mer­cial” clause, I’m fully aware that the vast major­ity of the web is adver­tise­ment dri­ven. At any given moment I may, or may not be run­ning ads myself. Given that real­ity, I don’t con­sider “non­com­mer­cial” to exclude ad dri­ven sites that may want to link to or com­ment on my con­tent. What I do object to are the sites that link or dis­play blog posts (with or with­out attri­bu­tion) solely in order to gen­er­ate Google juice.

I want to com­ment a lit­tle bit on why I’m choos­ing this par­tic­u­lar license. If you’ve read some of my writ­ing you’ll find that I’m not a par­tic­u­lar fan of the “Free Culture” move­ment. At the same time I am com­mit­ted to the con­cept of “the com­mons;” whether it be the phys­i­cal, intel­lec­tual or cre­ative com­mons. The ideas and and opin­ions that I present here were not formed in a vac­uum. I’m indebted to the work of those that have come before me and, if oth­ers are inspired by my work in some way (be it pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive) then I want them to be able to express that.

A par­tic­u­lar com­ment on the “No Derivative Works” clause: I fully sup­port the notion of mashups, re-mixes and the like; but I per­son­ally can­not see how my writ­ing could be used in those con­texts. Any use that I can envi­sion is fully cov­ered under the Fair Use con­cepts of com­men­tary, par­ody and crit­i­cism. On fur­ther reflec­tion I’ve decided that there are no usages allowed under the Creative Commons license that I con­done that wouldn’t already be avail­able under the fair use doc­trine. Given that, I’m revert­ing to all rights reserved. 

Photographic, Video and Audio Content

So, about that “unless oth­er­wise spec­i­fied” com­ment above. For the time being, any and all pho­tographs, videos, or audio con­tent pro­duced by me and pre­sented on this site is copy­right me, all rights reserved. The rea­son I’m going is this direc­tion for now is based on com­ments made by Dan Heller at his blog. Understand that this con­tent is still avail­able for the Free Use pur­poses of par­ody, com­men­tary and crit­i­cism.

Third Party Content

All third party con­tent dis­played on this site, includ­ing the WordPress soft­ware, theme and plu­g­ins is copy­right their respec­tive own­ers and any appro­pri­ate licens­ing applies. Third party con­tent not related to the site func­tion­al­ity is dis­played here for the Fair Use pur­poses of par­ody, com­men­tary, crit­i­cism or bru­tal mock­ery.

Terms of Service

Comment Policy

The com­ment pol­icy here is pretty sim­ple. You own your words, don’t be too big of an ass­hole. Comments are usu­ally open on any arti­cles posted here for 14 days, at which point com­ments auto­mat­i­cally close. I think that two weeks is more than enough time to com­ment on some­thing; but if you have some­thing to say about an older piece feel free to email me and I’ll con­sider adding it. Disqus doesn’t sup­port auto – clos­ing com­ments, so that’s out. The lat­estver­sion of Disqus now sup­ports auto-closing com­ments. I’ve cur­rently got that set to 30 days.

I’m allow­ing com­ments, not because I have any inter­est in fos­ter­ing a “com­mu­nity,” but because I am a firm believer in tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for one’s state­ments. Since I intend to say con­tro­ver­sial things, it’s more than fair to allow oth­ers to make their voices heard. That being said, I reserve the right to ban overly abu­sive com­menters and delete their com­ments. Also, I will have far more tol­er­ance for com­menters who use their real con­tact infor­ma­tion than those that hide behind an alias and a fake email address.

I also reserve the right to edit com­ments as nec­es­sary for pur­poses of for­mat­ting and dis­play.

Comment License

As is stated in the com­ment sub­mis­sion form, by sub­mit­ting a com­ment here you grant this site a non-exclusive revo­ca­ble license to repro­duce your words for the pur­pose of dis­play and name/web site in attri­bu­tion. I think that this is fair, if you dis­agree, don’t comment.

Well, since I’ve moved to using Disqus as a com­ment­ing sys­tem, I’ll just link to their Terms of Service.

Privacy Policy

I do not cur­rently gather any per­sonal infor­ma­tion from vis­i­tors other than that which they choose to pro­vide, and that which is tech­ni­cally required for the func­tion­al­ity of the site. Which brings up a point. I was recently shocked to dis­cover that there are peo­ple who con­sider their IP address to be some sort of pri­vate infor­ma­tion. Here’s a clue, it’s not. Yes, Virginia, every time you visit here you’re IP address is logged, and I can view them all. Any infor­ma­tion that is gath­ered will never be sold or dis­closed to any other party with one excep­tion. The excep­tion to the pre­vi­ous state­ment is that I reserve the right to use any infor­ma­tion pro­vided as I see fit in any case of “hack­ing” or legally action­able abu­sive behav­ior. The bot­tom line is, act like an adult and we’ll never have to worry about this.

Disclaimers

Last, and cer­tainly fuck­ing least, here are some disclaimers.

First, you will be offended. If you aren’t offended by some­thing that I write, then you are a hor­ri­ble, hor­ri­ble per­son and we should have a drink together sometime.

Second, every­thing I write here is my opin­ion and mine alone. It does not reflect the opin­ions of my employ­ers, my par­ents, your par­ents, the Pope of Rome, or Major League Baseball.

Last, all war­ranties void where pro­hib­ited. Chances of win­ning 1 in 11,235,813,213. Your milage may vary.