Terms of Use for this Website and Associated Media
Note: Our apologies, currently the Terms of Use are only available in English. When we receive a French translation we will add it or post a link to it here at the top of this page.
Summary
This website is primarily for the purpose of public communication. We respect users’ privacy, copyright, and the freedom of civil, public discourse. We expect those who add content to public forums respect these terms. We reserve the right to edit or delete content and block users who do not respect these terms.
Private data collected while signing up for a subscription, membership, donation, or contacting us by email is protected, retained and used as described below.
When you submit private data or content to public areas of our site, we cannot control or limit the uses or distribution of such data as described below.
Thanks to Weblogs at Harvard Law School for their Creative Commons license to derive some of our Terms of Use from their Terms of Use page.
Introduction
RhetCanada (also known as The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric-CSSR/La Sociéte Canadienne pour l’Étude de la Rhétorique- SCÉR or “The Association”) offers these Services (”Website” or “Blog”) to you subject to the terms and conditions of use (“Terms”) contained herein. By accessing, creating or contributing to this website hosted at http://rhetcanada.org and associated pages on Facebook and other online services/applications, in consideration for the services we provide to you, you agree to abide by these Terms. Please read them carefully before posting to or commenting on this forum.
1. Rights in the Content You Submit
Default Creative Commons Public License
Unless we or you specify a more restrictive form of copyright (see next section), any and all works of authorship copyrightable and posted to this site (“Content”) are submitted under the terms of an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons Public License. This includes any images or media you include within the body of your post or in file attachments, but does not include linked or embedded content residing on other sites.
Under this license, you permit anyone to copy, distribute, display and perform your Content, royalty-free, on the condition that they credit your authorship each time they do so. You also permit others to distribute derivative works of your Content, but only if they do so under the same Attribution-ShareAlike license that governs your original Content. Please read the full text of the Canadian Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons Public License.
Amongst other things, this license permits RSS aggregators to copy, distribute, display and perform any Content on our blog, which is syndicated using RSS.
By posting your Content using the Services, you are granting the Association a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and worldwide license to use and redistribute your Content in connection with the operation of the Services, including, without limitation, the license rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Content, and/or to incorporate it into a collective work and/or to incorporate it in any other works in any form, media or technology now known or later developed, without your prior approval, and you further waive any “moral rights” that you may have in the integrity of your Content.
Option for More Restrictive License Terms
If we or you prefer to offer your Content on more restrictive terms, follow this procedure:
- Label your submission with a full copyright notice, i.e., your name, the word “copyright” or symbol “©” and the year of first publication, and any other publisher. Please ensure that any policies or author contracts with the publisher permit the Content’s publication to this website.
Attribution
When publicly displaying, publicly performing, reproducing or distributing copies of your Content, or Content as incorporated into a collective work, The Association will make best efforts to credit your authorship. You grant the Association the permission to use your name for such attribution purposes. You, likewise, agree to represent yourself accurately. You acknowledge that misrepresentation may lead us, in our sole discretion, to cancel your use of the Services and delete any of your Content.
Copyright Complaints
The Association respects the intellectual property of others, and requires that our users do the same. If you believe that your work has been copied and is accessible on this site in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or that your intellectual property rights have been otherwise violated, please contact the webmaster.
2. Conduct
As a general matter, you may post content freely to this website, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable. You may not use the Association name to endorse or promote any product, opinion, cause or political candidate.
By posting content to any website and its associated media, you warrant and represent that you either own or otherwise control all of the rights to that content, including, without limitation, all the rights necessary for you to provide, post, upload, input or submit the content, or that your use of the content is a protected fair use. You agree that you will not knowingly and with intent to defraud provide material and misleading false information, or mislead others by creating a false identity of the sender or the origin of a message, impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity.
As a condition of your continued access to and use of the website and its associated forums, you agree to abide by all applicable federal, provincial, territorial and other laws and regulations. In addition, you agree not to upload, post, e-mail, link or otherwise transmit any material that constitutes unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation; infringes any patent, trade-mark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary or privacy rights of any party; is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, hateful, invasive of another’s privacy, or is racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; contains any form of destructive software such as a virus, worm, or any other harmful components or any other computer file, program or code, designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software, hardware or telecommunications equipment. You represent and warrant that the content you supply does not violate these Terms, and that you will indemnify and hold the Association harmless for any and all claims resulting from content you supply.
You acknowledge that the website administrators, volunteers and Association executive do not pre-screen or regularly review posted content, but that we shall have the right to remove at our sole discretion any content that we consider to violate these Terms.
Accessing Public Content
You understand that all content posted to this website and its associated forums is the sole responsibility of the individual who originally posted the content. You understand, also, that all opinions expressed by users of this site (other than the Webmaster and the Association Executive) are expressed strictly in their individual capacities, and not as representatives of our Association.
3. Disclaimer of Warranties and Limitation of Liability
This site is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. The Association makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, as to the site’s operation or the information, content or materials included on this site. To the full extent permissible by applicable law, the Association hereby disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose.
You agree that the Association will not be liable, under any circumstances and in any way, for any errors or omissions, loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of use of any content posted on this site. We reserve the right to edit or remove any content from the site at any time. You agree that you must evaluate and bear all risks associated with the use of any content, including any reliance on the availability, accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such content.
4. Privacy Policy
Private contact information of subscribers, members, and donors
If you choose to join our Association as a Subscriber, Member, or Donor, you will be directed to a form on a secure server at MailChimp that will keep your data protected. When you choose to subscribe to email notifications, your email address will be used to send you email bulletins from our Home Page or any individual posts to which you subscribe. If there are problems with your content, we may contact you via email as well.
We will not publish your subscriber or member information on our public website, nor will we share this information with any third parties that will put you on their mailing lists. Your data will reside in our secure password-protected account on MailChimp and the executive will keep downloaded data in secure folders. You may view and edit your information online at any time: our subscription emails include links to update your profile or preferences.
As your subscription or membership information becomes part of our confidential database, it may be retained in perpetuity, even after you unsubscribe to regular emails or cease to be a member. We may occasionally use your email address to contact you to invite you to re-subscribe, renew your membership, or participate in an event or opportunity.
When you contact our Association’s webmaster or executive through any of our published email addresses, your name, address and message becomes part of our Association Executive’s email records and may be shared with all current and future executive members.
Public Nature of Content Submitted to Blogs and Websites
The nature of websites, blogs, and other media is to reach a public audience. Please be aware that any information that you submit to us while making a public comment or post, or sharing a file or link, whether through online forms or email, including personally identifiable information, may be publicly displayed on our media or distributed to websites or applications not within our control. If you don’t want others to see such information, don’t submit it with your content.
Forms for Submitting Public Content
To create a blog post, forum post, or comment, you may be required to submit an email address and other personal information such as a username. If the form states we will not display your email address or certain other fields, we will not do so. However, we may display your name, username and other personal information provided in a comment submission form. If you are logged in to our site as a registered administrator, editor, author, or contributor, certain fields of your Profile may be displayed with your posts or comments. Display of visitor content is determined by the technology and the discretion of the webmaster and Executive.
Distribution of Content
Content on our site is automatically distributed to other services online, such as Google and other search engines. Each time we update the blog, it may also send pings or feeds to sites that index or track its updates. These sites may publicly display a hyperlink to our site and the time that we updated it.
Each new blog post to the home page is instantly distributed to Facebook page and to our email subscribers. Since our site publishes XML feeds, content from or links to our site may be publicly displayed on third party sites. In addition, users may create hyperlinks to blogs or specific posts, and may distribute content further via email or online posting in their personal and professional networks.
IP Addresses and Referrers
When you visit our site, we may may use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, to tailor site content and to format the site and software to user needs, and to generate aggregate statistical reports. We may use aggregate visitor data to prepare publicly displayed reports regarding the traffic on individual blogs, site popularity rankings, and referrers that visitors use to access individual blogs.
Cookies
If you visit our site, we may use session cookies while your browser is open, or while you are logged into our site. These cookies allow us to keep track of information you have submitted to us, so that you do not have to resubmit the information as you move from page to page. If you log in as a site administrator, editor, author, or contributor, always remember to log out of your site or account so that the computer’s other users cannot access your account.
Disclosure of Information to Law Enforcement
Available log records, and all data stored on this blog may be accessed by our system administrators. The system administrators may produce these records and data to Association executives upon request or suspected violation of our terms of use. It is our policy to cooperate with law enforcement officials in the detection, investigation, and prosecution of unlawful activity. If we receive a warrant or subpoena for user information, we may disclose requested records to law enforcement authorities or outside parties seeking information through the legal process.
Links to Independent Websites
This blog may link to independently run web sites or applications such as Facebook or Twitter. The Association is not responsible for the privacy practices or content of such web sites.
5. Modification of These Terms of Use
The Association reserves the right to change, at any time, at our sole discretion, the Terms under which these Services are offered. You are responsible for regularly reviewing these Terms. Your continued use of the Services constitutes your agreement to all such Terms.