Copying Policy

You have full permission to copy and repurpose the original content of the prose, code, and mark-up of any non-authenticated portion of this website for your own purposes.

If you utilize our original content we would appreciate a notation, hat-tip, backtrack-link, or other sort of attribution recognizing the source. Ideally, you could simply provide a deep hyperlink since that's how the Web is meant to function. We recognize however, that given the present state of Web technology, deep links are not always the best means of leveraging content. One classic example being "fair use" quotes and screenshots of the website for reviews and commentary.

As far as technical legal terminology goes, this website's content, code, and mark-up are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license⇒.

Creative Commons License.

As in all things, abiding by the golden rule⇒ would seem to be a reasonable default course of action.

If you have any specific concerns, please do not hesitate to email us at ip@bonsailabs.com.

Analog versus Digital Media

Unless you're viewing this website on analog media such as a paper print-out or film projection, its digital nature means that you've already had to "copy" it to see it. In fact, it's highly likely that multiple copies presently exist on your computer as part of your browser's cache and as part of working memory of one or more display buffers in your operating system.

If you're viewing this website over the Internet, in order to even arrive at your machine, the information had to be replicated literally thousands of times.

Unlike, for instance, the reading of a book which is "free use", all digital consumption currently requires the invocation of Copyright Law. To put it succinctly, there is no "free use" of any digital media, it's either "fair use" or "licensed use".

The Media Marketplace

After almost a decade of attempts, no successful implementation of a digital rights micro-payment system has succeeded. It seems that users demand control over media scheduling, playback environment, archival, and disinternment. If one more of these properties isn't present, only steep discounts from traditional pricing tiers (e.g. $1 dollar per song) have resulted in substantial revenue volumes.

Widespread adoption of broadband connectivity, peer-to-peer networks, the inherent flaws in digital-rights-management schemes, and consumer spending driven largely by generation Y and generation Z demographics result in a diffusion of the market and a fracturing of traditional business models. Today's media consumer embodies a culture of shared, morphic, and participatory media.

Ironically, in this environment, the more restrictions you add to media the more it is de-valued. Restricting copyrights for local user replication and repurposement of digital media, particularly media designed with affordances for mass-consumption, becomes a self-defeating and Sisyphian task.

Further Reading

If you are interested in deeper copyright and/or intellectual propery concerns particularly as it applies to "fair use" applications, users rights, and creators rights in our digitally mediated world, we urge you to investigate the philosophies and actions of the EFF⇒ and Creative Commons⇒.