One of the overarching goals of the site's policies was best expressed by mikey who once wrote:

Allow the site to be spidered, syndicated, deep-linked, quoted, and distributed as far and as wide as possible. Invite people ... to come up with creative ways to make use of the information. Invite others to mirror the entire ... site in case Jeff gets hit by a bus. Invite others to duplicate the site entirely because they don't like us or what we are saying.

Contributing an article (including articles in the Diary section) here means that in consideration for ip-wars.net initially publishing your material in whole or in part, and providing computer and communication resources, you grant ip-wars.net perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable serial rights:

• to publish it online, at ip-wars.net,
• to syndicate the title through our RDF backend,
• to store it in the site database, and
• to edit your article if necessary, either for legal reasons or for technical reasons (to eliminate troublesome html or other characters).

You agree that your article may be published under the terms of the attribution, share-alike Creative Commons License version 2.0 (CCL).¹

By submitting an article here, you warrant that you have the right to publish the material in your article, and agree to hold ip-wars.net harmless from any claims of libel, copyright infringement, breach of confidentiality, or other liability arising from the publication of your article.

ip-wars.net assumes no responsibility for checking the accuracy or originality of any submission nor do we assert any ownership or copyright interest in it.

Comment copyright and ownership:

Posting a comment on ip-wars.net means that in consideration for ip-wars.net initially publishing your material in whole or in part, and providing computer and communication resources, you grant ip-wars.net perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable serial rights:

• to display your comment,
• to store it in the site database,
• to make it available over the Internet through HTTP, RDF, or other technical means,
• to remove your comment from the site, at the sole discretion of the site owner. I do not remove comments in order to enforce my own tastes or opinions. Rather, I expect the user community to moderate inappropriate or offensive posts down to invisibility. In addition, the Scoop software provides features to combat crapflooding. In rare cases, however, I may need to remove a posting for legal reasons. For example, a posting might infringe someone else's copyright, or contain libelous or defamatory material.
• to edit your comment if necessary, either for legal reasons (as described above) or for technical reasons (to eliminate troublesome html or other characters). So far as possible, the editing will try to preserve the content and meaning of the comment.

You agree that your comment may be published under the terms of the attribution, share-alike Creative Commons License version 2.0 (CCL).¹

You incur no additional obligation to ip-wars.net beyond the grants of rights as described above. Ip-wars.net assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of your comment, and asserts no ownership or copyright interest in it.

Acceptable Use

ip-wars.net provides an open forum for discussion of a variety of topics. I normally do not try to enforce any rules like "no obscenities", "no politics" or similar rules. I prefer to trust the community to maintain civility through use of the site's features. Other actions like the use of bots to make posts, use of multi-nyms to bypass or manipulate the ratings system, or extreme cases of abuse of the ratings system represent other types of violations. This list should not be considered complete or exclusive.

If the Scoop software proves inadequate in addressing abusive users, I reserve the right to take additional measures.

If I notify you by e-mail or posting on the site that your activities violate the acceptable use of the site, you agree to cease such activities. Failure to cease such activities after notification will be treated as a violation of the terms of use of the site. I reserve the right to use any means available at my discretion to stop such violations including technical and legal means.

I reserve the right to modify this policy at any time. Please direct all questions regarding this policy to jcausey@ip-wars.net (be sure to read the disclaimer below before sending an e-mail).

Third party materials submitted to IP-wars.net:

By its very nature, articles and comments on this site may include materials from third parties that are available here under license terms not consistent with this site's license. For example, material may come from a site that allows its use, but forbids it being re-released under a different license from that of the parent site. Or, the material may already be public domain and this site's license may represent an impermissible additional restriction. In these cases, further use of these materials should be consistent with the original license. In other words, we do not trump the original license for the material. So if you are a "downstream" user of information from this site, please be mindful of what license may apply.

Attribution:

If you use materials from this site pursuant to the CCL, you are required to provide attribution and indicate the terms of the CCL license the material is published under (including a link to the CCL terms [a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/"]. When providing attribution, you should use the username of the poster (of the article or comment) and indicate that the material came from ip-wars.net. E.g., JCausey at the ip-wars.net site said...

E-mail to the site owner:

WARNING:
Please be aware:

I reserve the right to use any e-mail you send to me as either a testimonial of how great ip-wars.net is or me personally, or as evidence of some of the stupid stuff sent to me via e-mail. If you do not want your e-mail to be used in such a manner, don't send it!!!

Looking to disrupt the site?

I have no idea why someone would want to disrupt a free site. Nevertheless, there are people in this world who seem intent on increasing the "noise" here at the site through crapfloods, spam, and generally useless, insulting drivel that they think passes as meaningful commentary. Apparently, if I look at it generously, their sole interest is to annoy us. If I'm not so generous, I start wondering about who would be interested in stopping a web site that examines threats to FOSS.

Anyway, if you are one of the people interested in disrupting the site, please be aware that I may use a variety of resources available to me to protect the site and keep in running. This may include features built into the Scoop software, steps that involve the server itself, or involvement of third parties where necessary (e.g ISP's or appropriate law enforcement authorities). Oh yeah, you may get your username listed on the Administrative Actions page as well. So instead of trying to prove how sneaky, cunning, l33t, or whatever you are, why don't you take the time to write an article about an intellectual property issue?