ʞ / statement of copyright

by alexis summer hale
in this license i try to strike a fair balance between protecting my interests as an author and my commitment to free culture ideals. if you have any suggestions on ways to improve it or would like to ask for an exception, please feel free to do so — i care a lot about protecting people’s right to use my work fairly.

unless otherwise indicated, all content on this site (hereafter "covered content") are original works and my sole intellectual property. i reserve all rights not explicitly granted in this document. unless otherwise stated, any rights granted on any basis may be revoked at any time at my sole discretion.


derivative works

the creation of “derivative” content such as fan works, reinterpretations, or critique featuring characters, settings, storylines, or themes from the subset of the covered content that is presented as fictional, whether or not categorizable as “fair use,” is expressly permitted and encouraged, provided that access to such derivative content is not conditioned on payment of a fee and that the derivative work uses either this or a more permissive licensing regime. in the event that this policy is altered or revoked, derivative works already existing at the time of the alteration or revokation shall continue to be bound by the same policy as before the alteration; this includes any subsequent revisions of the same derivative work.


archival

covered works may be stored, hosted, displayed, or otherwise made available for consumption elsewhere, whether in digital or print format, for the purposes of not-for-profit archival, so long as a) the author is visibly credited and content origin (this website) is explicitly communicated to the viewer, and b) substantive content of media so archived is not altered except as necessary to conform to technical limitations, with the exception that annotations may be added so long as they are distinguished from the original content. this right to archive shall extend to all legal persons. “substantive content” as used in this section shall be understood to mean the actual body text of a page and any endnotes, excluding any layout or typographical conventions which may be altered freely as needed. images are subject to the same provisions as substantive content except that they may be freely omitted. such archives need not be accessible to the general public.


translations

translating covered works into another format such as, but not limited to, PDF or ePub, and/or another human language, so far as the translation is made for the purpose of improving accessibility and is made available without fee or consideration, is expressly permitted and encouraged.


plagiarism exemptions

i present the following policy not because i expect many readers of my site will take advantage of it, but in hopes that other web designers and writers might adopt this policy as well. the text of this section is released into the public domain and under the CC0 license. feel free to take and modify for your own use as you see fit (i would appreciate a link, but it's not obligatory). if you do however, please modify your robots.txt to block the turnitin.com crawler.

plagiarism, often described as an “academic crime,” is the act of taking another person’s work and presenting it as one’s own. most schools, at least in the united states, take a very strong stance against plagiarism and make use of automated tools to detect content that may have been taken verbatim from or that overly resembles content catalogued by their web crawlers.

as someone who was herself deeply traumatized by the American school system and has known many other victims of similar trauma, i feel very strongly that absolutely nobody should feel obligated to play by its rules. nobody should be invested in their report cards, nobody should give a damn what their teachers or administrators think of them, and nobody should take their schooling remotely seriously. if you are currently trapped in the American school system — or any abusive school system anywhere in the world — your only concern should be getting out alive.

you should feel no obligation to obey any academic authority figure, teacher, principal, or superintendant. you should feel no guilt for “cheating” a fundamentally dishonest, manipulative, and totalizing institution, and you should only care about your grades insofar as they have an impact on the life you hope to build outside of school. middle school kids: your grades have no impact on that life, and don’t let any parent or teacher make you think otherwise.

therefore, i give you full permission and encouragement to take and use any portion of this site and present it, without crediting me, as your own creation, provided the following criteria are met:

  1. you are a student no older than age 20 attending a primary or secondary school under the coercion of a state, parent, guardian, or any other public or private entity (the possibility of legal penalties or loss of opportunity for refusing to attend school shall be deemed "coercion" for the purpose of this clause)
  2. the content you copy from this website and present as your own will not be exposed to anyone who does not attend, teach at, or administer your school in some capacity

my robots.txt has blocked turnitin.com from indexing my site from the beginning, and it always will. anything copied from this site should be safe to submit or include in your work. please note however that while i have taken every possible measure to make my work safe to plagiarize, this DOES NOT MEAN you will not face potentially severe consequences if caught — nothing in this license will keep teachers and principals from punishing you, so exercise discretion and make sure to change any wording that doesn't sound like you. teachers are known for googling lines that seem out of place, and this website is indexed by Google. but for the record, if you are a teacher or administrator and you intend to punish a student for plagiarizing this site, you are doing to in direct and total contradiction to the wishes and intent of the author.


legalese: this document confers a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to “plagiarize” (as defined above) the covered content. the license is automatically granted to all individuals who meet the criteria listed above, hereafter "licensees". licensees are authorized to represent in the limited context described above that they are the original and sole author of the work; and further may make any alterations they choose to the licensed content before presenting it. irrespective of any action by the licensees, the original author of that content retains all rights and ownership of the content, and may terminate or modify at any time the privileges granted by this license.

any company, organization, or individual operating a “web crawler” or automatically indexing content from websites by any means is absolutely forbidden from using any content on this site for any purpose other than described above, except for the purpose of making covered content reachable from a search engine that may be used without fee by the general public.

notwithstanding the above, any company, organization, or individual who seeks by any means to use content from this site for the purpose of providing a tool to detect plagiarism is absolutely forbidden from using or archiving content from this site in any fashion. these forbidden uses will be treated as a violation of the author's intellectual property rights to the full extent permitted by law and dealt with accordingly.