Copyright Infringements - Very Important! Please Read!

[Admin]

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QUOTING NEWS ARTICLES:
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If you want to refer to a news article, please write your own abstract/synopis of the article and then post a link to the original article if you desire. Simply copying and pasting someone else's news article w/o their permission is copyright infringement. It also potentially deprives the publisher of the advertising revenue they might derive when someone comes to their site to read their news. News organizations invest alot of money into developing their news stories. This is done for profit. They would not appreciate their copyrighted work being republished w/o their permission and due compensation.

With today's search engines, it is very easy to find copies of one's works that are republished on the internet. Please note that VEI/somd.com will cooperate with all legal subpoenas to determine a violator's identity.

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LINKING TO THIRD PARTY IMAGES:
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We've received complaints about posts on forums.somd.com having embedded links to images hosted on someone else's website.

The primary reason they would complain is because it eats their bandwidth. When you embed a link to a photo on someone else's website, it uses that site's bandwidth which they have to pay for. If you get a rather large graphic in a popular thread, you're talking about alot of bandwidth. We've had it happen to us, so we are very sympathetic to other site owners who have a similar problem.

Please note that we're only talking about when you embed the link in the post, i.e. the image always displays in-line with the rest of the post. Following is an embedded image:

http://www.somd.com/photos/space/tn_01-pia03707.jpg

There should be no problem with just posting the URL to the website page that contains the image you are interested in discussing. Using this method requires that the reader of the post click on the link to see the image. For example, the following is a link to the page where the above image appears:

http://www.somd.com/photos/space/

Also, many of these graphics/images/photos/articles are copyright protected and the owners aren't real thrilled about them reposted around the 'net. Please note that materials do NOT have to be identified by a copyright statement to be protected by a copyright.

Copyrights are a very complicated issue and it is often difficult to tell if something has a valid copyright due to a myriad of changing laws over the past century. A good rule of thumb is that unless the owner specifically posts a statement saying that item is in the public domain, you should consider it as copyrighted. The only easy exception is that nothing created by the FEDERAL government may be copyrighted. This does not necessarily apply to state and local governments.

So, please be considerate of this situation - it is not nice to borrow someone else's bandwidth or material w/o their permission.

If you have a graphic to share, you can do this:[list=1][*]Make sure the originating site has okayed the graphic's use on other websites. This usually includes free clipart sites or sites that have specified that their graphics are yours for the taking. If you are certain that you have permission to use the information, download the graphic and include it as an attachment - that way it uses our bandwidth instead of theirs.[*]If the site has not approved the image for third party use, you can just post the URL to the page that contains the image in question. This way, people will have to go to the originating website to view the image. As far as we know, there is no law or rule against posting URLs to other websites.[/list=1]

Thank you for your cooperation!