Website Terms of Use

This Terms of Use page is easily found through highly visible links on every page of my site. Be advised that by visiting my website, CrunchyData.com, you hereby agree to the following terms:

You agree not to copy any content on this site for other than personal use, and only for use on your personal computer, without a certified email from me that gives you explicit permission to use specific content for a specific website or publication. You also agree not to scrape or copy any portion of my content, or to show any portion of my website in frames on another site.

Media outlets may, of course, quote me per the Fair Use Doctrine, and I appreciate being included in your articles.  Journalists or other bloggers quoting me in context of a larger article may also do so under Fair Use.

However, slimy, spammy wanna-be sites that use other people’s content to avoid doing the work themselves are not covered under this doctrine, and you know who you are. Go to Google.com/translate if you need help understanding this.

If you scrape or frame or otherwise exploit my content, including my feed, without documented proof that I have sent you a certified email authorizing you to use that content, you may get one friendly reminder to remove my content from your site. Or you may not. It depends on my mood and how easy it is to find your contact information.

Should you continue to fail to respect my copyright, a DMCA takedown notice will be filed with Google and your ISP host. And then you won’t have a website.

Should you decide to disregard this notice and steal my content anyway, you hereby agree to adjudicate any claims that arise due to your use/misuse of my text, images, video, audio, or any other content that I own, in a court of law in the State of California, County of Alameda.

You agree that your ISP hosting provider may accept service for a copyright violation lawsuit on your behalf if you are located outside the United States, and you agree to abide by the Alameda County court’s decision should such a case be litigated.

In other words, if you want to use our content, just ask. If I agree, which is highly likely for all legitimate requests, I’ll send you a certified email saying so.

And if you’re a content scraper/hotlinker/ignorant plagiarizer, you may get one chance, and then all bets are off.

If you’re a blogger who is tired of thieves stealing your hard work, this is the one page that you may feel free to copy and use. Just replace my site name with yours, and turn off search engine indexing (I use Yoast’s ‘Meta Robots’ plugin for that). No credit required. And let me know if you need help with someone stealing your content via my contact page.

Check back often, especially if you plan to scrape my site, because I reserve the right to change these terms at any time.