SunshinePPS is a collection of internet services located at sunshinepps.org and its subdomains, including a discussion forum ("the forum") at talk.sunshinepps.org and a wiki ("the wiki") at wiki.sunshinepps.org. SunshinePPS is operated by the Center for Transparent Analysis and Policy ("CTAP", "we", "us", or "the organization"). CTAP is a non-profit charitable organization whose mission is to advance the development, understanding, and adoption of transparent public policy, and we have created SunshinePPS to further this mission.
These terms govern use of the internet services comprising SunshinePPS. To use these services, you ("you" or "the user") must agree to these terms with CTAP, the organization that operates the services.
CTAP may offer other products and services, under different terms. These terms apply only to use of SunshinePPS.
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These terms include a number of important provisions that affect your rights and responsibilities, such as the disclaimers in Disclaimers, limits on CTAP's liability to you in Limitation on Liability, and your agreement to cover CTAP for damages caused by your misuse of SunshinePPS in Responsibility.
Subject to these terms, CTAP gives you permission to use SunshinePPS. Everyone needs to agree to these terms to use SunshinePPS.
Your permission to use SunshinePPS is subject to the following conditions:
You must be at least thirteen years old.
You may no longer use SunshinePPS if CTAP contacts you directly to say that you may not.
You must use SunshinePPS in accordance with Acceptable Use and Content Standards.
Certain activities, whether legal or illegal, may be harmful to other users and violate our rules, and some activities may also subject you to liability. Therefore, for your own protection and for that of other users, you may not engage in the following activities on our sites.
You may not break the law using SunshinePPS.
You may not use or try to use another's account on SunshinePPS without their specific permission.
You may not buy, sell, or otherwise trade in user names or other unique identifiers on SunshinePPS.
You may not send advertisements, chain letters, junk mail, spam, or other solicitations through SunshinePPS, or use SunshinePPS to gather addresses or other personal data for commercial mailing lists or databases.
You may not automate access to SunshinePPS, or monitor SunshinePPS, such as with a web crawler, browser plug-in or add-on, or other computer program that is not a web browser. You may crawl SunshinePPS to index it for a publicly available search engine, if you run such a search engine.
You may not use SunshinePPS to send e-mail to distribution lists, newsgroups, or group mail aliases.
You may not falsely imply that you're affiliated with or endorsed by CTAP.
You may not use SunshinePPS to engage in harassment or abuse of other users. You may not make threats, stalk, spam, or vandalize.
You may not use SunshinePPS to violate the privacy of others. You may not infringe the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States of America or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content). You may not solicit personally identifiable information for purposes of harassment, exploitation, violation of privacy, or any promotional or commercial purpose not explicitly approved by CTAP. You may not solicit personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18 for an illegal purpose or violating any applicable law regarding the health or well-being of minors.
You may not hyperlink to images or other non-hypertext content on SunshinePPS on other webpages.
You may not remove any marks showing proprietary ownership from materials you download from SunshinePPS.
You may not show any part of SunshinePPS on other websites with <iframe>.
You may not disable, avoid, or circumvent any security or access restrictions of SunshinePPS.
You may not strain infrastructure of SunshinePPS with an unreasonable volume of requests, or requests designed to impose an unreasonable load on information systems underlying SunshinePPS.
You may not infringe copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other proprietary rights under applicable law.
You may not, with the intent to deceive, post content that is false or inaccurate. You may not engage in fraud.
You may not use SunshinePPS to engage in false statements, impersonation, or fraud. You may not intentionally or knowingly post content that constitutes libel or defamation.
You may not attempt to impersonate another user or individual, misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive.
You may not make paid contributions without disclosure. You must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. Applicable law, or community policies and guidelines, such as those addressing conflicts of interest, may further limit paid contributions or impose additional disclosure requirements.
You may not use SunshinePPS to participate in, or intervene in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.
You may not encourage or help anyone in violation of these terms.
We reserve the right to exercise our enforcement discretion with respect to the above terms.
You may not submit content to SunshinePPS that is illegal, offensive, or otherwise harmful to others. This includes content that is harassing, inappropriate, or abusive.
You may not submit content to SunshinePPS that violates the law, infringes anyone's intellectual property rights, violates anyone's privacy, or breaches agreements you have with others.
You may not submit content to SunshinePPS containing malicious computer code, such as computer viruses or spyware.
You may not submit content to SunshinePPS as a mere placeholder, to hold a particular address, user name, or other unique identifier.
You may not use SunshinePPS to disclose information that you don't have the right to disclose, like others' confidential or personal information.
CTAP may investigate and prosecute violations of these terms to the fullest legal extent. CTAP may notify and cooperate with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting violations of the law and these terms.
CTAP reserves the right to change, redact, and delete content on SunshinePPS for any reason. If you believe someone has submitted content to the forum in violation of these terms, contact us immediately.
You must create and log into an account to use some features of SunshinePPS.
To create an account, you must provide some information about yourself. If you create an account, you agree to provide, at a minimum, a valid e-mail address, and to keep that address up-to-date. You may close your account at any time by e-mailing admin@sunshinepps.org.
You agree to be responsible for all action taken using your account, whether authorized by you or not, until you either close your account or notify the organization that your account has been compromised. You agree to notify the organization immediately if you suspect your account has been compromised. You agree to select a secure password for your account, and keep it secret. You are responsible for safeguarding your own password and should never disclose it to any third party.
CTAP may restrict, suspend, or close your account on SunshinePPS according to its policy for handling copyright-related takedown requests, or if the organization reasonably believes that you've broken any rule in these terms.
Nothing in these terms gives CTAP any ownership rights in intellectual property that you share with SunshinePPS, such as your account information, posts, or other content you submit to SunshinePPS. Nothing in these terms gives you any ownership rights in the CTAP's intellectual property, either.
Between you and CTAP, you remain solely responsible for content you submit to SunshinePPS. You agree not to wrongly imply that content you submit to the forum is sponsored or approved by CTAP. These terms do not obligate CTAP to store, maintain, or provide copies of content you submit, and to change it, according to these terms.
Others who receive content you submit to the forum may violate the terms on which you license your content. You agree that the company will not be liable to you for those violations or their consequences.
In accordance with our goals to build a body of knowledge and a community that outlast the participation of any one member, all users contributing to SunshinePPS are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, so long as that use is properly attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute is granted to any derivative works. We require that, when necessary, all submitted content be licensed so that it is freely reusable by anyone who cares to access it.
You agree to the following licensing requirements:
Text and other media to which you hold the copyright
When you submit text or other media to which you hold the copyright, you agree to license it under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (“CC BY-SA 4.0”).
Please note that this license does allow commercial uses of your contributions, as long as such uses are compliant with the terms.
Attribution
Attribution is an important part of this license. We consider it giving credit where credit is due – to authors like yourself. When you contribute text, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions:
Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article, topic, or post to which you contributed. (Wiki articles and discussion topics/posts have tags with author information and/or history pages that lists all authors and editors);
Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy that is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on the SunshinePPS websites; or
Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions).
Importing text
You may import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, but in such case you warrant that the text is available under terms that are compatible with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
You agree that, if you import text under a CC BY-SA license that requires attribution, you must credit the author(s) in a reasonable fashion. Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as copying within SunshinePPS), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the text. The attribution requirements are sometimes too intrusive for particular circumstances (regardless of the license), and there may be instances where the SunshinePPS community decides that imported text cannot be used for that reason.
Documents and media artifacts
Media on SunshinePPS are available under a variety of different licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution. When you contribute documents or media artifacts, you agree to comply with the requirements for such licenses.
No revocation of license
Except as consistent with your license, you agree that you will not unilaterally revoke or seek invalidation of any license that you have granted under these Terms of Service for text content or non-text media contributed to SunshinePPS, even if you terminate use of our services.
Public domain content
When you contribute content that is in the public domain, you warrant that the material is actually in the public domain, and you agree to label it appropriately.
Re-use
Re-use of content that we host is welcome, though exceptions exist for content contributed under "fair use" or similar exemptions under copyright law. Any re-use must comply with the underlying license(s).
When you re-use or re-distribute a text page developed by the SunshinePPS community, you agree to attribute the authors in any of the following fashions:
Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article, topic, or post which you are re-using. (Wiki articles and discussion topics/posts have tags with author information and/or history pages that lists all authors and editors);
Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy that is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on the SunshinePPS websites; or
Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions).
In addition, please be aware that text that originated from external sources and was imported into SunshinePPS may be under a license that attaches additional attribution requirements. Users agree to indicate these additional attribution requirements clearly. Such requirements may appear for example in a banner or other notations pointing out that some or all of the content was originally published elsewhere. Where there are such visible notations, re-users should preserve them.
For any non-text media, you agree to comply with whatever license under which the work has been made available (which can be discovered by clicking on the work and looking at the licensing section on its description page or reviewing an applicable source page for that work). When re-using any content that we host, you agree to comply with the relevant attribution requirements as they pertain to the underlying license or licenses.
Modifications or additions to material that you re-use
When modifying or making additions to text that you have obtained from a SunshinePPS website, you agree to license the modified or added content under CC BY-SA 4.0 or later.
When modifying or making additions to any non-text media that you have obtained from a SunshinePPS website, you agree to license the modified or added content in accordance with whatever license under which the work has been made available.
With both text content and non-text media, you agree to clearly indicate that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using text content in a wiki, it is sufficient to indicate in the page history that you made a change to the imported text. For each copy or modified version that you distribute, you agree to include a licensing notice stating which license the work is released under, along with either a hyperlink or URL to the text of the license or a copy of the license itself.
You agree to indemnify CTAP from legal claims by others related to your breach of these terms, or breach of these terms by others using your account on SunshinePPS. Both you and CTAP agree to notify the other side of any legal claims for which you might have to indemnify CTAP as soon as possible. If CTAP fails to notify you of a legal claim promptly, you won't have to indemnify CTAP for damages that you could have defended against or mitigated with prompt notice. You agree to allow CTAP to control investigation, defense, and settlement of legal claims for which you would have to indemnify CTAP, and to cooperate with those efforts. CTAP agrees not to agree to any settlement that admits fault for you or imposes obligations on you without your prior agreement.
CTAP is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of SunshinePPS, and to hosting the full content of this project for the public free of charge. However, we act only as a hosting service, maintaining the infrastructure and organizational framework that allows our users to build SunshinePPS by contributing and editing content themselves. Because of our unique role, there are a couple of things you should be aware of when considering our relationship to you, SunshinePPS, and the other users:
We do not take an editorial role. Because SunshinePPS is collaboratively edited, all of the content that we host is provided by users like yourself, and we do not take an editorial role. This means that CTAP generally does not monitor or edit the content of the SunshinePPS websites, and we do not take any responsibility for this content. Similarly, we do not endorse any opinions expressed via our services, and we do not represent or guarantee the truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any submitted community content. Instead, we simply provide access to the content that your fellow users have contributed and edited.
You are responsible for your own actions. You are legally responsible for your edits and contributions on SunshinePPS, so for your own protection you should exercise caution and avoid contributing any content that may result in criminal or civil liability under any applicable laws. For clarity, applicable law includes at least the laws of the United States of America. Although we may not agree with such actions, we warn users that authorities may seek to apply other country laws to you, including local laws where you live or where you view or edit content. CTAP generally cannot offer any protection, guarantee, immunity or indemnification.
You may find some material erroneous. Although we may host information that pertains to professional topics, including legal or financial issues, this content is presented for general informational purposes only. It should not be taken as professional advice. Please seek independent professional counseling from someone who is licensed or qualified in the applicable area in lieu of acting on any information, opinion, or advice contained in one of the SunshinePPS websites.
Through SunshinePPS, CTAP does its best to provide educational and informational content to a very wide audience, but your use of SunshinePPS is at your sole risk. We provide SunshinePPS on an "as is" and "as available" basis, and we expressly disclaim all express or implied warranties of all kinds, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We make no warranty that SunshinePPS will meet your requirements, be safe, secure, uninterrupted, timely, accurate, or error-free, or that your information will be secure.
We are not responsible for the content, data, or actions of third parties, and you release us, our directors, officers, employees, volunteers, and agents from any claims and damages, known and unknown, arising out of or in any way connected with any claim you have against any such third parties. No advice or information, whether oral or written, obtained by you from us or through or from SunshinePPS creates any warranty not expressly stated in these Terms of Service.
Any material downloaded or otherwise obtained through your use of SunshinePPS is done at your own discretion and risk, and you will be solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from the download of any such material. You agree that we have no responsibility or liability for the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any content or communication maintained by SunshinePPS. We retain the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time with or without notice.
You are solely responsible for your use of any third-party websites or resources. Although SunshinePPS may contain links to third-party websites and resources, we do not endorse and are not responsible or liable for their availability, accuracy, or the related content, products, or services (including, without limitation, any viruses or other disabling features), nor do we have any obligation to monitor such third-party content. Use of services run by others may be governed by other terms between you and the one running service.
Some states or jurisdictions do not allow the types of disclaimers in this section, so they may not apply to you either in part or in full depending on the law.
Neither CTAP nor its suppliers will be liable to you or to any other party for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary damages, including but not limited to, damages for breach-of-contract, loss of profits, goodwill, use, data, or other intangible losses, regardless of whether we were advised of the possibility of such damage. In no event shall our liability exceed fifty U.S. dollars (USD 50.00) in aggregate. In the case that applicable law may not allow the limitation or exclusion of liability or incidental or consequential damages, the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you, although our liability will be limited to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.
CTAP welcomes your feedback and suggestions for SunshinePPS. See the Contact section below for ways to get in touch with us.
You agree that CTAP will be free to act on feedback and suggestions you provide, and that the organization won't have to notify you that your feedback was used, get your permission to use it, or pay you. You agree not to submit feedback or suggestions that you believe might be confidential or proprietary, to you or others.
Though we hope you will stay and continue to contribute to SunshinePPS, you can stop using our services any time. In certain circumstances it may be necessary for either ourselves or the SunshinePPS community to terminate part or all of our services, terminate these Terms of Service, block your account or access, or ban you as a user. If your account or access is blocked or otherwise terminated for any reason, your public contributions will remain publicly available (subject to applicable policies), and, unless we notify you otherwise, you may still access our public pages for the sole purpose of reading publicly available content on SunshinePPS. In such circumstances, however, you may not be able to access your account or settings. We reserve the right to suspend or end the services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice. Even after your use and participation are banned, blocked or otherwise suspended, these Terms of Service will remain in effect with respect to relevant provisions, including Your Content, Feedback, Responsibility, Acceptable Use, Disputes, Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, and General Terms.
We hope that no serious disagreements arise involving you, but, in the event there is a dispute, we encourage you to seek resolution through the dispute resolution procedures or mechanisms provided by SunshinePPS. If you seek to file a legal claim against us, you agree to file and resolve it exclusively in a state or federal court located in Portland, Oregon. You also agree that the laws of the State of Oregon and, to the extent applicable, the laws of the United States of America will govern these Terms of Service, as well as any legal claim that might arise between you and us (without reference to conflict of laws principles). You agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of, and agree that venue is proper in, the courts located in Portland, Oregon, in any legal action or proceeding relating to us or these Terms of Service.
To ensure that disputes are dealt with soon after they arise, you agree that regardless of any statute or law to the contrary, any claim or cause of action you might have arising out of or related to use of our services or these Terms of Service must be filed within the applicable statute of limitations or, if earlier, one (1) year after the pertinent facts underlying such claim or cause of action could have been discovered with reasonable diligence (or be forever barred).
If any provision or part of a provision of these terms is unenforceable as written, but could be changed to make it enforceable, that provision or part of a provision should be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable. Otherwise, that provision or part of a provision is deemed severable from these Terms of Service and will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible, and all other provisions of these Terms of Service will remain in full force and effect.
If in any circumstance, we do not apply or enforce any provision of these Terms of Service, it is not a waiver of that provision. Neither the exercise of any right under this Agreement, nor waiver of any breach of this Agreement, waives any other breach of this Agreement.
You may not assign your agreement with the organization. The organization may assign your agreement to any affiliate of the organization, any other organization that obtains control of the organization, or any other organization that acquires assets of the organization related to SunshinePPS. Any attempted assignment against these terms has no legal effect.
These Terms of Service do not create an employment, agency, partnership, or joint venture relationship between you and the organization. If you have not signed a separate agreement with the organization, these Terms of Service are the entire agreement between you and the organization. If there is any conflict between these Terms of Service and a signed written agreement between you and the organization, the signed agreement will control.
You understand that, unless otherwise agreed to in writing by us, you have no expectation of compensation for any activity, contribution, or idea that you provide to the organization or to the SunshinePPS community.
Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary in these Terms of Service, the organization and you agree not to modify the applicable terms and requirements of any free license that is employed on SunshinePPS when such free license is authorized by these Terms of Service.
You may notify the organization under these terms, and send questions to the organization, at admin@sunshinepps.org.
The organization may notify you under these terms using the e-mail address you provide for your account on SunshinePPS, or by posting a message to the homepage of SunshinePPS or the forum or your account page.
CTAP last updated these terms on August 18, 2022, and may update these terms again. We will post all updates to the SunshinePPS website and discussion forum. For updates that contain substantial changes, we agree to e-mail you, if you've created an account and provided a valid e-mail address. CTAP may also announce updates with special messages or alerts on the SunshinePPS discussion forum.
Once you get notice of an update to these terms, you must agree to the new terms in order to keep using SunshinePPS.
This document is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3.0 or later (GPLv3-or-later).
