TERMS OF SERVICE

1.  Sup?

Welcome to my corner of the web.  We hope you’ll stay awhile (and you probably will because we’re awesome), but first we need you to read this document (“Agreement”) since it’s required as a condition of accessing our website and using our service.  We know most people don’t read these things on other sites, but you should read ours because a) It’s a legally-binding contract and; b) It’s good practice because although we’re cool, some other site might make you sign away your favorite pet if you don’t read things fully.

2.  What the Heck does this site do?

Our site is aimed at people who do digital publishing, with information about WordPress, designing, and tips and tricks of the trade.  Basically we are geeks and nerds who have published a site for geeks and nerds who publish sites.

3.  What we make you tell us

When using our service, we may collect your name, e-mail address, and blood type in case we wish to harvest your organs for nefarious Frankenstein monster-related purposes.

Please note that you must be at least thirteen years of age or older to use our service.  This is because we are prohibited by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act from collecting information from anyone below that age.  If you’re a kid, we recommend either a) Going outside and getting some sunshine and fresh air before you turn into nerds like us or; b) If your heart is set on becoming a nerd, writing a letter to your local congressman to request that they change the law.

4.  Disclaimer

Our site is provided for FREE.  Yes, FREE.  However, because of that, we can’t provide any warranties that your computer won’t catch fire from a line of code that you use.  Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but please understand that we’re not in a position to guarantee that every tip on our site will work for you.  So, you agree to release us from any liability for spontaneous computer combustion or any other damage that may occur as a result of using our service.

5.  Rules of Conduct

When using our site, you agree that you will not:

  • Violate any provision of law applicable in the State of New York or anywhere else in the United States or the Planet Krypton.
  • Violate any applicable legislation, treaty, or other rule in force of the United States or any other political entity having jurisdiction over this Agreement, you, BlogCraving, or the website or service that we provide.
  • Hack, crack, phish, fish, SQL inject, Botox inject, or otherwise interfere with the integrity of the computer systems of our Site, Service, or Users.
  • Run any bots or other software to aggregate or browse our content.
  • Infringe on anyone’s intellectual property rights.
  • Defame anyone.
  • Defraud, mislead, or otherwise act dishonestly.
  • Otherwise act in a manner which, at this site's sole discretion, is objectionable, or which may bring travislusk.com into disrepute.  Basically, don’t be a poopy-head.

6.  Our Stuff

As you may have noticed, our site is pretty much completely based on providing content, so we ask that as fellow digital publishers, you respect the golden rule of the Internetz and not steal other people’s stuff just as you wouldn’t want us to copy your site.  You agree not to copy, distribute, display, disseminate, or otherwise reproduce any of the information on our website, or our website itself, without our prior written permission.  This includes, but is not limited to, copying content (whether or not we own the full rights to it, as copying it still harms our network capacity, so don’t even copy stuff we’ve received a license for).

7.  Your Stuff

We may permit user-uploaded content like blog comments or other stuff.  By uploading any content to our site, you agree that you grant us a universal, perpetual, sublicensable, intergalactic, commercial and non-commercial, irrevocable license to use such content, and that you represent to us that you have the right to grant such a license.  You agree to indemnify us as well as any third party affected by your wrongful representations if you should represent falsely that you have the right to grant this license.  Please don’t upload the lyrics to some Disney song because we’ll totally be coming after you if Mickey Mouse sends his lawyers to sue us.

8.  Branding ‘n’ Such

“BlogCraving” and "TravisLusk.com" is a trademark used by us, ICAST LLC, to uniquely identify our website, business, service, and secret pizza sauce recipe.  You agree not to use this phrase anywhere without our prior written consent.  Additionally, you agree not to use our trade dress (our lawyers assure us that this is a legal term and not an article of women’s clothing), or copy the look and feel of our website or its design, without our prior written consent.  You agree that this paragraph goes beyond the governing law on intellectual property law, and includes prohibitions on any competition that violates the provisions of this paragraph.

9.  Indian Giving

Where TravisLusk.com has given prior written consent for your use of our protected material in accordance with our above “Copyright” and “Trademarks” provisions, we may revoke that consent at any time.  If we so request, we may require that you immediately take action to remove from circulation, display, publication, or other dissemination, any of the marks, copyrighted content, or other materials that we previously consented for you to use.  So, don’t paint BlogCraving on your car if it’s a really sweet car or we might just take it from you.

10.  Copyright Whiners

We take copyright infringement very seriously (some of our best friends are copyrights), and we have registered a Copyright Agent with the United States Copyright Office, which limits our liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  If you believe that your copyright has been infringed, please stop whining like a girly man and send us a message which contains:

  • Your name.
  • The name of the party whose copyright has been infringed, if different from your name.
  • The name and description of the work that is being infringed.
  • The location on our website of the infringing copy.
  • A statement that you have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted work described above is not authorized by the copyright owner (or by a third party who is legally entitled to do so on behalf of the copyright owner) and is not otherwise permitted by law.
  • A statement that you swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information contained in this notification is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or have an exclusive right in law to bring infringement proceedings with respect to its use.

You must sign this notification and send it to our Copyright Agent at:

Attn: Copyright Agent ICAST LLC 244 Fifth Avenue Suite L219 New York, NY 10001

Although no similar provisions exist under U.S. law for trademark infringement, we recommend that you submit similar information to us about any alleged trademark infringement so that we can take appropriate action.

11.  Representations & Warranties

We make no representations or warranties as to the merchantability of our service or fitness for any particular purpose.  You agree that you are releasing us from any liability that we may otherwise have to you in relation to or arising from this Agreement or our products, for reasons including, but not limited to, failure of our service, loss of income, negligence, or any tort or other cause of action.  To the extent that applicable law restricts this release of liability, you agree that we are only liable to you for the minimum amount of damages that the law restricts our liability to, if such a minimum exists.

You agree that we are not responsible in any way for offers made by third parties through our website.  We may decide to host ads on our site that we can’t always monitors, and nine times out of ten, magic beans are just beans.

We are not liable for any failure of our service, including any failures or disruptions, scheduled or unscheduled, intentional or unintentional, on our website which prevent access to our website temporarily or permanently.

The provision of our service to you is contingent on your agreement with this and all other sections of this Agreement.  You represent to us that you are not a dolphin.  We have nothing against dolphins, but they can’t be bound by contracts.

Nothing in the provisions of this “Representations & Warranties” section shall be construed to limit the generality of the first paragraph of this section.

12.  You break it, you buy it

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless for any claims by you or any third party which may arise from or relate to this Agreement or the provision of our service to you, including any damages caused by your use of our website or acceptance of the offers contained on it.  You also agree that you have a duty to defend us against such claims and we may require you to pay for an attorney(s) of our choice in such cases.  You agree that this indemnity extends to requiring you to pay for our reasonable attorneys’ fees, court costs, and disbursements.  In the event of a claim such as one described in this paragraph, we may elect to settle with the party/parties making the claim, and you shall be liable for the damages as though we had proceeded with a trial.  Basically, don’t do anything with our site that would get you into trouble with your own site, or we can send you the legal bill and point and laugh at you.

13.  Rules of the Game

This Agreement shall be governed by the laws in force in the State of New York.  The offer and acceptance of this contract is deemed to have occurred in the State of New York.

14.  Courts, not Duels

You agree that any dispute arising from or relating to this Agreement will be heard solely by the Small Claims Court of New York City (“Small Claims Court”).  We used to just do pistols at dawn but we lost too many court cases and interns that way.

You agree that where the amount you would otherwise claim exceeds the monetary jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court, you will waive your right to collect any damages in excess of the monetary jurisdiction and instead only sue us for the maximum amount.

Likewise, if you have multiple causes of action, you agree that if your claim would be eligible to be heard by the Small Claims Court, except that one or more of the causes of action or other rights to collect damages would not be eligible for the Small Claims Court to hear, you will waive your right to claim damages for any of the ineligible claims and instead still bring the dispute in the Small Claims Court for only the claim or claims over which the Small Claims Court has jurisdiction to hear.

Likewise, if you would otherwise have any remedies available to you outside of the Small Claims Court, such as the right to an injunction, specific performance, or other equitable relief, you agree that, if the Small Claims Court has no jurisdiction to grant such relief, you will waive your right to obtain such relief against us.

If you bring a dispute in a manner other than in accordance with this section, you agree that we may move to have it dismissed, and that you will be responsible for our reasonable attorneys’ fees, court costs, and disbursements in doing so.

You agree that the prevailing party in any dispute will be entitled to claim from the unsuccessful party the entire amount of the prevailing party’s reasonable attorneys’ fees, costs, and disbursements in relation to the dispute.  We believe this is known in layman’s terms as “winner takes all.”

15.  Force Majeure (Fancy French term for “someone else’s fault”)

You agree that we are not responsible to you for anything that we may otherwise be responsible for, if it is the result of events beyond our control, including, but not limited to, acts of God, acts of demigods, war, insurrection, riots, terrorism, crime, zombie attacks, labor shortages (including lawful and unlawful strikes), embargoes, postal disruption, alien invasions, communication disruption, failure or shortage of infrastructure, shortage of materials, or any other event beyond our control.

16.  Severability

In the event that a provision of this Agreement is found to be unlawful, conflicting with another provision of the Agreement, or otherwise unenforceable, the Agreement will remain in force as though it had been entered into without that unenforceable provision being included in it.

If two or more provisions of this Agreement are deemed to conflict with each other’s operation, BlogCraving shall have the sole right to elect which provision remains in force.  We may do this by flipping a coin, choosing which one we think is best for us, or any other method.

17.  Assignment

You may not assign your rights and/or obligations under this Agreement to any other party without our prior written consent.  We may assign our rights and/or obligations under this Agreement to any other party at our discretion.  We may play ping pong with our right and/or obligations, bouncing them back and forth with strangers, but we won’t because we’re cool like that.

18.  Amendments

We may amend this Agreement from time to time.  When we amend this Agreement, we will update this page and indicate the date that it was last modified.  You must visit this page each time you come to our website and read and agree to it if the date it was last modified is more recent than the last time you agreed to the Agreement.  We know this is boring, but it’s the only way to keep you updated since you don’t have to give us your e-mail address to use our site (though it’d be awesome if you did give us it).  If you don’t agree, it makes us sad because you don’t have permission to use our site and service anymore and you must immediately go somewhere else.

Last Modified:  March 23, 2013