I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I HATE IT. But I gotta do it. The Web has been attracting slimeball ripoff artists in record numbers. In particular, there has been a large number of people trying to claim ownership of pages written by other people. Some of it seems to be simple legal incompetence; some is outright piracy.
The whole point of the Web, after all, is to share intellectual property. You'd think that people would realize that if you put things on the Web, people would look at them, and that hyperlinking is what gives the Web its vitality. But there are always the clueless and the greedy.
If you don't protect your intellectual property, you won't have it for long. So here's our legal policy.
Ownership
Everything on this Website, unless otherwise noted, is the property of Stephen G. Smith.
I reserve the right to change, update, or remove any part of this Website at any time.
While I make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information on these pages, I make no warranty as to the accuracy or usability of anything on these pages.
Web Page Use Policy
Anyone, anywhere has the right to:
View these pages. In connection with this, end users and intermediate systems may use proxies, caches, and local copies in a manner designed to facilitate the viewing of these pages.
Create HTML hyperlinks to these pages, in any context, for any reason, without limitation. If you link to one of our pages, we would appreciate it if, as a simple matter of courtesy, you would send us e-mail telling us about your site. This is not a requirement, however.
Make paper copies of these pages, for any purpose, as long as my name, copyright notice, and contact information is on the copies with the same prominence as on the displayed Web page. Note — you can meet this requirement by pushing the
print
button on your Web browser.
In the event that any confidential information is stored in these
pages, it will be protected by encryption, passwords, or some other
technological lock on the door
. If it's not locked, it's not
confidential.
No one has any other rights to these pages. In particular, no one may, without explicit permission from me (signed paper agreement or PGP/GnuPG signed e-mail):
Copy the contents of any part of this Website into another Website except in connection with proxying or caching as described above.
Publish any part of this Website in a paper publication. Note that this is for any use that goes beyond personal use, removes the contact information, and/or alters the text.
Claim any kind of ownership rights whatever over any of this material.
Please note that we're not fanatics here. We're not saying that you can't do anything; we're just saying to get permission first. For copying or publication that leaves my logo and contact information, doesn't claim any rights or co-authorship, and doesn't involve substantial change to the text, approval will probably be pretty much automatic.
Policy Policy
We reserve the right to change any policy listed here at any time, for any reason. (Yeah, sorta makes the whole thing useless. But every other Web policy has this clause, too.)
