Legal Policies

For your information:

• Our web site is completely open to public access. There are no hidden files or pages.
• You are welcome to use, steal, or borrow any of our web coding, CSS, and HTML layout – BUT if you improve the code in any way, please let us know how.
• Our photographs are ours. The words are ours. The concepts behind the photographs and words are ours. If you take, steal, or use them in any way, other than within the specifications set aside on this page and in our Copyright Policy page, we will hunt you down, take as much money from you as we can, make you pay all the expenses that it cost to get as much money from you as we can, and make your life miserable.

Got it? Now to the serious legal stuff.

Official Legal Policy

Within this page you will find information about our Privacy Policy, Newsletter Privacy and NO SPAM Policy, Children and Minors Online Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, and Terms of Use Agreement, and more information you need to know about the legal rights and policies to protect us and you during your visit to our web page. You can find information about our Copyright Protection Policy and Accessibility Policy on the pages we’ve provided, as well as more information to help you understand these policies and how they affect you.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The essay and article content can be freely copied and redistributed for educational, non-commerical use less the restrictions outlined in the attribution noncommercial sharealike license. All photographs are copyrighted and may not be used in any way, other than with the distribution of the article and essay content for non-commerical purposes.

According to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0, you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
• For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
• Waiver/Permission. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get written permission from the author.
• Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

Privacy Policy

We are seriously committed to using our best efforts to respect the privacy of our visitors, which is why we have this statement and Privacy Policy. You may browse our entire web site without restriction from passwords, pop-ups, and the collection of any personal information, remaining anonymous during your visit. For those who send us a request for regular email (journals and announcements) or sign up for our newsletter, we promise to use your email for our own use, and not to sell or give it to anyone, without asking permission first. We do not use cookies (a small data file sent from a web server to your computer to store data on your hard drive) or any other intrusive methods to collect personal information about you.

The only personal information we get from you comes from you volunteering it. Remember, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your personal information. Please be careful and responsible with your personal information whenever you’re online.

We do collect information from visitors related to their usage of our site, specifically which pages were visited, how long they were visited, the type of browser software used, search terms used to find our site, and search terms used to search our site, etc. The information is gathered by the use of web server statistics gathering software. It collects no personal information from you or your computer other than the barest of anonymous details. From this non-personal information we learn about visitors browsing habits and work hard to improve our site with this technology.

Copyright Legal Policy

In addition to our Copyright Policy and statement, you should know the following: We maintain this site for your personal information, education, and introspection. You may download the materials on this site only for your personal or educational use, provided you retain all copyright and other proprietary notices which appear on any such material. You many not, however, disrupt, modify, reuse, repost, or use the content of the web site for any public or commercial use including, but not limited to, any text, image, audio, or video, without the VanFossen’s express written permission and consent.

You should assume that everything you see within this web site is copyrighted, regardless of whether or not there is a copyright notice on the material. This excludes all HTML, CSS, and program code to present the pages. These are open source and you are welcome to use them. The VanFossens neither warrant nor represent that any materials displayed within the web site will not infringe the rights of third parties not owned or affiliated with the VanFossens. Although the VanFossens do their best to make sure the information provided is accurate and up-to-date, the VanFossens make no warranties or representation as to its accuracy, and no liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in the content of the web site.

Our Newsletter Privacy Policy

Our subscription newsletter service is free, international, and is provided “as is”. We will not send you unsolicited email. We have the right to modify this service, in any form, without prior notification, but we will try to give you a bit of a warning, to be professional about it. We also have the right to refuse to provide this service to anyone and at any time. We have the right to delete any user from our subscription database (mailing list) for any reason at any time without prior notification, but again, we will try to be nice about it.

If you have subscribed to our newsletter, you have the right to stop the subscription at any time. The newsletter is free and open to any interested party. We have a strong “NO SPAM” policy and we will not sell, rent, share, or otherwise give your email addresses to a third party without your consent. We also will not send you any emails that you have not agreed to, especially those outside of the bounds of our web site material and subject matter. Like all good web sites, we may send out occasional email announcements about new articles and information within our web pages. At some time in the future we will be adding advertising to our newsletter, but the email addresses will not be shared with the advertiser. If at any time you may stop these emails and have your email removed from our list. Instructions for removal as well as our newsletter policy are located on the bottom of such announcements and on the sign up web pages.

Children and Minors Online Privacy

Our web site contains no purposefully offensive material, though our weblog (Journal Thoughts) does contain some language, references to bodily functions, and editorial comments that might not be welcome in a strict home or for children under the age of seven, though most of those under the age of seven are more experts in language and bodily functions than we are. But seriously, our web pages have passed and conformed to the Internet industry standard known as PICS with a classification and rating for “All Ages” of family members.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) states that Web site operators cannot knowingly collect personal information from children under age 13 without verifiable parental permission. We do not specifically collect information about children or minors. We ask that minors, under the age of 16, do not submit any personal information to us without the permission of their parents or guardian.

Comments Policy

We permit comments and trackbacks on the majority of our articles. Anyone may comment. Comments are subject to moderation, filtering, spell checking, editing, and removal without cause or justification.

All comments are reviewed by comment spamming software and by the site administrators and may be removed without cause at any time. All information provided is volunteered by you. Any website address provided in the URL will be linked to from your name, if you wish to include such information. We do not collect and save information provided when commenting such as email address and will not use this information except where indicated. This site and its representatives will not be held responsible for errors in any comment submissions.

Comments are also covered by our Children and Minors Online Privacy Policy.

By submitting a comment on our website, you are agreeing to hold this site, Brent and Lorelle VanFossen, VanFossen Productions, and all subsidiaries and representatives harmless from any and all repercussions, damages, or liability.

Again, we repeat: We reserve all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks.

Disclaimer and Terms of Use Agreement

By using this site, you agree that all content and material on this site, including without limitation, text and images, are protected by copyrights and other intellectual property rights. Except as expressly authorized by VanFossen Productions, Lorelle and Brent VanFossen, and Taking Your Camera on the Road (herein known as “the VanFossens”), in writing, you agree not to sell, license, rent, modify, distribute, copy, reproduce, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, edit or create derivative works from such materials and content. Retrieval of other data or content from this web site to create or compile directly or indirectly, a collection, compilation, database, or directory without written permission from the VanFossens is prohibited.

By using this web site and/or downloading materials from this site, you consent to our policies and agree to hold harmless the VanFossens as specified and to be bound by the terms and conditions set forth in the Disclaimer and Terms of use Agreement. You also agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless the VanFossens and their representatives against any claims, demands, actions, damages, or other liabilities, including expenses and attorney’s fees that may arise from your use of this web site.

These policies are subject to change without notice, and all changes will be posted on this page if we make a change so you are always aware of what we are doing behind the scenes, which is putting a lot of energy into giving you the best information we can about life on the road and nature photography.

We permit you to download and print as many copies of our articles and materials as you would like for the sole purpose of personal non-commercial use, specifically for educational purposes, provided you keep all copyright and other proprietary notices (such as Copyright 2004 Lorelle and Brent VanFossen, VanFossen Productions, Taking Your Camera on the Road, www.cameraontheroad.com. All Rights Reserved).

• Although we do our best to serve the users of this web site, errors and/or losses of any kind can happen at any time. We will do our best to correct them as soon as possible.
• We cannot be accused by anyone for anything and at any time as long as we do not purposely and knowingly violate any written International law.
• We abide by the international standards for web design, accessibility, and Web and Internet standards in general.
• You agree that visiting any external links from this web site is at your own risk and may cause you to leave this web site. The VanFossens make no warranty or representation regarding the content of any linked web site.
• Most of the materials provided on the Taking Your Camera on the Road web site are provided free of charge for your information and use. Non-commercial use of these materials is encouraged, and in fact requested. Proper citation (acknowledgment) is requested and is to accompany the material.
• The use of this site is at the user’s own risk and under the condition that Lorelle and Brent VanFossen, VanFossen Productions, Taking Your Camera on the Road, and all related agents and companies is not liable and shall be held harmless for its use or its results.
• Forewarning of potential damage or risk shall not create a liability of any sort, either.

Website Practices and Policies

The following information is supplemental to our legal statements and describes our general policies for this web site regarding intended users, accessibility standards, access and download times, links to external sites, languages used within this web site, permission to link to our web site, and how to handle complaints and grievances. On other pages within our site you can also find our policies and statements on copyright and accessibility.

Intended Users

Our web site is diverse, but it is primarily aimed at providing information about nature photography, travel photographer, travel issues, life on the road, the business of nature and travel photography, and travel locations for the traveler or photographer. We also provide helpful information and resources on related subjects and issues, typically related to the traveler or photographer, on web page design and development and Internet and Email tips and techniques. The web site is open and also available to users of all ages and interests.

Access and Download Times

Due to the vast use of photographs and graphics within our pages, we have worked hard to reduce access and download times as much as possible in terms of image sizes and page length. When possible, we do divide articles across several pages, but we restrict this to only the longest of articles or article series that are most conducive to this slicing process. Remember this site is dedicated to travel and nature photography and photographs are just part of the package. They can take time to load dependent upon your bandwidth and Internet connection speeds and traffic.

Accessibility Standards

We state our overall policy on accessibility on our Accessibility Policy page, it is an important part of our web site policy that our site be open to everyone. Therefore we have taken extensive steps in our programming to make these pages available via web page readers for the visually impaired and other physically challenged persons, as well as readable on a variety of media forms such as different operating systems, Internet browser software, handheld computers, Web TV, cell phones and more. As new technology develops, we will do our best to meet their needs so our pages remain accessible to everyone.

Links to External Sites

Part of our willingness to help you fully understand the subject matter involved in our many articles, we provide thousands of links to external web sites that may be of interest to you. Access to these sites may cause you to leave this web site. While we do our best to check and verify these sites before we list them, we are not responsible for them. Even if we recommend these sites specifically, we cannot be held responsible for their content, intent, or usage, or anything else. A link to an external site does not imply endorsement. We can’t control these sites and offer them only as information and resources. We also work hard to keep these links updated, so if you find a link that is wrong or in error, please let us know so we may fix it.

Link Exchanges

We get many requests on a daily basis to exchange links with Taking Your Camera on the Road. These go on a list, on a first-come-first-serve basis. We accept link exchanges with organizations, companies and websites which feature related material with a focus on education and not commercial promotion or link farms. While we cover a wide range of topics on our site, link exchanges must contain educational information or specific product information related to our site’s content, which is primarily photography, nature photography, and travel.
We do blogging, but we do not host a blogroll. We frequently link to a related site in one of our articles, but may or may not add that link to our Link Resources Category. All link exchanges are subject to review and you will be notified if your link request is accepted or denied. Again, our apologies for any lengthy delays. Such is life on the road.

Links to Us

We provide thousands of links to other web sites and are honored to be linked to from other web sites. In legalese, you are hereby granted a limited, revocable, and non-exclusive right to create a hyperlink to this web site so long as the link does not portray the VanFossens or the site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, in a false, misleading, derogatory, or otherwise objectionable manner. So be nice to us. You have permission to use our logo or provided link logo as part of your link to us.

Taking Your Camera on the Road

Visit Taking Your Camera on the Road for more information.

www.cameraontheroad.com

To include our logo with your link, use the following link code:

Languages

Currently, this web page is available in English, but we have plans to make some of the technical articles available in other languages. Stay tuned.

Complaints, Grievances, Problems, and Whines

If you have any problem or feedback about our web site, please let us know as soon as possible so we may do our best to rectify the situation. Complaining to other people who aren’t involved won’t help us create a helpful and informative web site. So let us know directly. You can email us at Lorelle VanFossen and we will do our best to resolve the issue. We will do our best to respond immediately, but remember, we travel a lot as part of our lifestyle and work, so be patient if we don’t get back to you right away.