Legal Information

Flutopedia has been developed as an educational resource in the service of Native American flute (“NAF”) players, makers, teachers, afficionados, and the Native American flute community in general.

My goal is to make a large body of well-maintained information and resources readily available. To provide as much information and resources as possible, this web site includes content from many sources that is under a variety of usage licenses. As such, there are restrictions on what you can do with the content of this web site. To keep this web site well-maintained and allow it to grow, the information and resources are centralized on this web site. To best serve that goal, the content on this web site are copyrighted.

Copyright

Copyright ©2002-2019 by Clint Goss.

This copyright applies only to the “copyrighted content” of this web site. The “copyrighted content” is content that is not otherwise in the public domain or under copyright or other restrictions on use by another party (see [USCO 2011]  for an overview).

This copyright applies whether this web site is accessed on-line on the World Wide Web, accessed from a physical medium such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, or accessed by other means.

Under this copyright, you may:

• access and print the copyrighted content solely for your own personal use,
• create a hyperlink from another web page to http://www.Flutopedia.com, or
• catalog the copyrighted contents for use on a search engine that is accessible to the public.

Uses of the copyrighted content outside of those described above can only be made after prior written permission from the copyright holder.

Practicalities

This means that, among other things, you may not reproduce copies of this web site to distribute to others. Even if it is for non-commercial purposes. Even if your intent is honorable. Reproducing this web site for other than your own personal use is a violation not only of the copyright of this web site, but also violates the usage right of some of the content that has been provided by others.

Instead of reproducing copies, please provide others with a link to http://www.Flutopedia.com/.

If you are a teacher, you may have the impulse to print pages and distribute them. However, printers are resource hogs and pages printed from this web site are a poor copies — hyperlinks do not work, assistive technologies that have been built into this web site do not function, and there are no sound players or helpful explanatory text over links and images.

If you wish to provide your students with access to this material, please ask them to visit www.Flutopedia.com.

Unless you are cataloging Flutopedia for a search engine that is accessible to the public, you may not create a link to an internal page in the site (a “deep link”), such as http://www.Flutopedia.com/legal.htm. The page to which you are linking could move in the future and your deep link would become invalid. Instead of using deep links, please link directly to the top-level page http://www.Flutopedia.com/ or http://Flutopedia.com/. See How to Link to Us for some nice graphics you can use.

You may not include any portion of this web site in a frame on another web site, or utilize framing techniques to enclose any trademark, logo, or other proprietary information (including images, text, page layout, or form) of this web site.

You may not use any meta tags or any other “hidden text” utilizing the names or trademarks of this web site.

Intellectual Property Issues

I believe that the contents of this web site do not violate any copyright or intellectual property laws of the United States, the domicile of publication of this web site. This is based, on a case-by-case basis, on one or more of these principles:

• The content is copyrighted by myself (Clint Goss) or a company that I own (Manifest Spirit Music/ASCAP, Manifest Spirit Records, Second Spirit Music/BMI, Rhythm Spirit Music/SESAC, Clint Goss Consultants, Ltd.).
• The content is in the public domain in the United States. In many cases, this means that:
• the creator of the work has placed the work in the public domain (for example, with the declaration “No Rights Reserved” or use of the Creative Commons CC0 License), or
• any copyright has expired (for example, on works published in the United States prior to January 1, 1923, published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 with its copyright not renewed, any work first published without copyright notice prior to 1978, etc.) See Copyright Law of the United States and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code (but only if you have a serious desire to plow through some seriously dense legal material).
• It is an original work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government, or a bureau of the United States Government, such as the U. S. Census Bureau, as part of that person's official duties. Most works of the United States Government are excluded from copyright law — see Title 17 U.S. Code §105, including exceptions to §105 created by the Standard Reference Data Act of 1968, Public Law 90-396 ([Congress 1968] ).
• The content has been distributed under a Creative Commons license that allows used on this web site. For example, works distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (designated as CC-BY), permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
• The content is a derivative work (typically a photograph) of a protected work that is subject to a Freedom of Panorama (FOP) provision in the home country of the protected work. FOP provisions vary from country to country, but the provisions generally apply to protected works that are on permanent public display. See the Wikimedia Commons summary of FOP provisions.
• The content is free of copyright limitations based on Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images were not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality. A similar principle applies in the position of the Wikimedia Foundation that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain" (see Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag).
• The content is available under the MIT License of the Open Source Initiative. This license typically applies to software, such as the SWFObject code of Geoff Stearns.
• I have graciously received permission for use of the content on this web site.
• The license associated with the image as published on the source web site allows use on this web site.
• The inclusion of the content satisfies the doctrine of fair use (see Title 17 U.S. Code §107) in United States copyright law (for example, limited use of copyrighted material for research, teaching, or scholarship).

Other jurisdictions may have other rules. Some content on this web site that is in the public domain in the United States might not be in the public domain outside the United States. Some countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years (Mexico has 100 years, Côte d'Ivoire has a general copyright term of 99 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala, Samoa, and Honduras have 75 years.) Furthermore, some of these countries implement the rule of shorter term (Côte d'Ivoire and Honduras) and some do not (Mexico, Columbia, Guatemala, and Samoa).

Some content that satisfies the doctrine of fair use in the United States may not satisfy the equivalent doctrine (sometimes called “fair dealing”) in jurisdictions outside of the United States. Some jurisdictions have no doctrine that corresponds to the doctrine of fair use in the United States copyright code.

In addition, there are complex issues surrounding material that has been authored by Indians or that originated in American Indian or other domestic sovereignties ([Skrydstrup 2009] ).

Content on this web site that is covered by a version of the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license (the “CC content” - for example, content on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia projects) is necessarily excluded from the “copyrighted content” of this copyright notice. Furthermore, the use of such material, for the avoidance of doubt, is considered an “adaptation” with respect to the Legal code of the license (for example, see the Legal Code of the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license), and the extent of that adaptation extends only to the CC content (as adapted for this and) and any content pertaining directly to or describing that CC content.

It is not my intent nor the policy of this web site to violate any ownership rights. My intent is to make useful material and resources available to people who have an interest in the Native American flute and to treat American Indian archival material in a culturally-responsible manner.

If you are a copyright holder and feel that any section of content on this web site infringes your rights to that content, then please Notify Us. The notification of the claimed infringement must contain the information required by and otherwise comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S. Code §512(c).

Also, every effort has been made to trace and attribute all known authors, regardless of their current copyright or reporduction rights. I apologize for any errors or omissions and welcome these being brought to my attention by Contcting Us.

Adobe PDF

This site offers some content in Adobe Portable Document Format files (“PDF files”). The format of PDF files are subject to a number of patents. However, Adobe has provided this Patent Clarification Notice, the relevant portions of which are copied here from the version retrieved April 6, 2011:

Font Embedded in PDF Files

In order to improve the portability and consitant rendering of PDF files, subsets of the fonts used in those PDF files have been embedded within the PDF files themselves, to the extent possible. The embedded fonts in PDF files from this site are from two sources, both of which are licensed for embedding in PDF files:

The Adobe standard embedded fonts:

• Courier
• Courier-Oblique
• Courier-Bold
• Courier-BoldOblique
• Helvetica
• Helvetica-Oblique
• Helvetica-Bold
• Helvetica-BoldOblique
• Times-Roman
• Times-Italic
• Times-Bold
• Times-BoldItalic
• Symbol
• ZapfDingbats

Fonts licensed by Microsoft for unrestricted embedding in PDF files. See Microsoft's Redistribution FAQ for these fonts:

• Georgia
• Georgia,Bold
• Georgia,BoldItalic
• Georgia,Italic
• Verdana
• Verdana,Bold
• Verdana,BoldItalic
• Verdana,Italic
• Webdings
• Wingdings

Public Domain

Although there is no agreed-upon international definition of the public domain, a publication of the World Intellectual Property Organization defines it, in relation to intellectual propery, as “the scope of those works and objects of related rights that can be used and exploited by everyone without authorization, and without the obligation to pay remuneration to the owners of copyright and related rights concerned – as a rule because of the expiry of their term of protection, or due to the absence of an international treaty ensuring protection for them in the given country” ([WIPO 2003], page 305).

GIF Image Format and the LZW Compression Algorithm

Some images on this site, in particular the finger diagram images that are available for download, are in GIF format (Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format). Note that encoding and decoding GIF format images involves use of the LZW (Lempel–Ziv–Welch ) compression algorithm, which is the subject of U.S. Patent 4,464,650 as well as a massive amount of intellectual property litigation.

While I am not offering authoritative legal advice, I do believe that use of these images is allowed under the license terms of the patent holder at the time these images were produced (i.e. I believe you can use them for personal non-commercial use, without paying royalties).

Disclaimers

This web site does not endorse any person, establishment, organization, product, or service, commercial or otherwise.

Hyperlinks to targets outside of the domain flutopedia.com (“external links”) are provided for the user's convenience. They are not to be construed as an endorsement of any person, establishment, organization, product, or service, commercial or otherwise.

This web site, together with its associated content and software, is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis, and without any express or implied warranties or representations of any nature with respect to the information obtained through this web site including, without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose. No representations or warranties are made that this web site, its servers, or e-mail sent from this web site are free from viruses or other harmful components.

The material included in this Web site is for informational purposes only.

Although a sincere effort is made to provide accurate content, I offer no guarantees as to the correctness of the information on this web site. If you find an error, please report it so that I may address it.

A sincere effort is also made to test this web site on popular web browsers. However, since browser software is constantly in flux, please be aware that a problem you may be experiencing might be due to a weakness in your browser, printer driver, or operating system.

The organization that is hosting this web site is not responsible in any way for the content of the web site.

There are some inherent dangers involved in playing and/or making the instruments described on this web site. I will not be held liable under any circumstance for direct, indirect, incidental, punitive, or consequential loss or damage or injury, due directly or indirectly to the use of this information provided on this web site.

Certain state laws do not allow limitations on implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain damages. If these laws apply to you, some or all of the above disclaimers, exclusions, or limitations may not apply to you, and you might have additional rights.

Trademarks

“Flutopedia” is a trademark of Manifest Spirit Music, a wholly-own division of Clint Goss Consultants, Ltd.

Adobe™ Acrobat Reader is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.

Arial™ is a trademark of The Monotype Corporation.

DOI^® is a trademark of the International DOI Foundation.

Grammy^® is a registered trademark of The Recording Academy.

Netscape and Netscape Navigator are trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation.

Microsoft^® Internet Explorer is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Other trademarks cited in at least one place on this web site using the symbols “^®” or “^TM” are the property of their respective owners.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this Web site, please contact us using our Contact Page or E-Mail us at:

This site was generated Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 11:16AM EDT on host Husky.