Copyrights and the Internet.

Public domain - not!

Written permission (as defined below) by professionals ("you") who are members of DrinkACT and its subsidiaries, affiliates and marketing allies, must be granted rights from the ActEliteTeam for any desired material before you can use it in any another medium when visiting www.acteliteteam.com web site, unless it is posted on an individual web page within the www.ActEliteTeam.com for the purposes of educational material, training materials, marketing materials, that have been provided for usage as a Drink Act Dealer. We have worked very hard and making the www.ActEliteTeam.com available for all ACT Dealers, we simply would appreciate the respect in regards too all our efforts that have been put into this site for all of you too use. Therefore if there is some thing you really want too have on your site, or for use in any advertising, copying or photocopy materials for production purposes please email us at webmaster@acteliteteam.com for written permission and usage rights.

DrinkAct Web Ownership RIghts and Trademarks Usage:
All ownership rights in trademarks (such as DrinkACT Web™) or copyright (such as for images or text) remain with the original owner and is non-transferable, non-assignable, non-exclusive, limited copyright license to copy DrinkACT Web™ 's images, text, video, and audio to your Web page and to no other location. We advise you too log into your DrinkActweb.com Dealer site and review their "Terms & Conditions".

Material Permission.

Sound files, graphic images (including web graphics, photos, logos and other digital art), writings, text, HTML, cascading style sheets, html, cgi, php, javascripts or any other material that you are given permission to use or display on your web site does not entitle you to claim copyright to the material in question. Permission to use someone else's material does not make you the rightful owner or holder; it just gives you the right to use it.

Understanding Copyrights

There is one thing that must be clarified, though. If you see a certain page layout and like the way it looks, you could "legally" reproduce something similar if you write the coding all by yourself without copying any of the source code from the original page. The actual intangible idea may not be copyrighted. What is copyrighted is the tangible result of the idea, which would be the layout written out in HTML coding and saved to a hard drive. That means no copying and pasting of another person's source code.

What about public domain and/or royalty-free stuff?

Word of caution: If you are not 100% sure that the material is in the public domain (sometimes "free sites" offer copyrighted material), do not use it. Placing disclaimers that read, "if you find anything on this page that belongs to someone else contact me" or "if you feel that I may be violating someone's copyright please let me know" just don't cut it and may even be considered irresponsible. You may be violating somebody's copyright and could still be leaving yourself open for a cease and desist order from the owner.

Hot-linking and Spider Harvesting.

Hot-linking, or linking directly to another web site's images and/or spider-harvesting (robots programmed to index pages and pull images onto another server) is not only bandwidth theft, but may also be construed as copyright infringements. The images that are hot-linked are reproduced in the web site that is performing the direct linking and/or spider-harvesting as an unauthorized derivative work, or may be giving the impression that the owner of the images is the one who is hot-linking. Either constitute a violation of the real owner's copyright. Please do not link directly too any of our images, or audio files. If you wish too use one of our audio files on your web site, please email the www.ActEliteTeam.com webmaster@acteliteteam.com the full audio file and written permission with usage rights.

Fair Use.

Fair use or fair practice is utilization of a portion of a copyrighted work "as is" for purposes of parody, news reporting, research and education about such copyrighted work without the permission of the author. Use of copyrighted works, or portions thereof, for any other purpose is not deemed fair use, so be careful! That includes copying text or scanning pictures from postcards, magazines, books or any other work. Scanning a photo of the Amazon Forest printed in National Geographic, and using it without permission on your personal web site where you write about your family trip to South America will most likely not be considered as fair use. However, if you republished the photo on your site to comment on the photo as it was published in National Geographic, this would most likely be considered fair use. You still have to credit your source by naming the author of the work on the same page. If possible, take the time to contact the owner and request permission to use the owner's work, and more likely than not the owner will be very appreciative and give you a favorable response.

Many think that one may take someone else's work and use it for "educational" purposes without obtaining the author's permission or giving credit because it is "fair use". When you wrote a term paper in school, didn't you credit your sources? Even if you paraphrased the author's original words, or if you feel that you don't need the author's permission because it falls in this vague concept of fair use you must credit your source's hard work by naming your source as a reference. This is a requirement under copyright legislation. If not, you'd be committing plagiarism.

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