The information and materials on the Indiana Legal Archive (ILA) website and connected ILA social media (collectively “ILA Sites”) are provided for general entertainment and informational purposes only and are not intended to be, and should not be interpreted as, legal advice. The con­tent of the ILA Sites may be changed with­out notice. The views expressed on the ILA Sites do not necessarily reflect those of any academic, employment, or other insti­tu­tion with which the author or authors of the ILA Sites are affiliated.

Links to External Third-Party Websites

The ILA Sites may, from time to time, con­tain links to external, third-party websites. These links are pro­vided solely as a con­ve­nience and for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the ILA of any of the products, services, or opinions of the corporation, organization, or individual to which the links are directed. The ILA bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality, or content of the external third-party websites or for that of subsequent links. Please contact the external website(s) directly for answers to questions regarding their content.

The ILA Sites are open to the public. While the ILA welcomes public participation and comments on the ILA Sites, individuals are fully responsible for the content of their posts. All persons should con­sider their com­ments care­fully and refrain from posting any infor­ma­tion or ideas they consider private. 

The public commenting features on the ILA Sites are governed by general rules of respectful civil discourse.

The ILA does not discriminate against any views and is a strong advocate of transparency. However, the ILA would like to remind those readers who may have been sleeping through their high school civics class that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects only against governmental infringements of free speech. Because the ILA is NOT a governmental entity, it reserves the right to remove content from ILA Sites for any reason without consent. In particular:

The ILA will remove comments that contain abusive, vulgar, offensive, racist, threatening, or harassing comments, personal attacks of any kind, or offensive terms that target specific individuals or groups.

The ILA may remove comments that contain personal information (whether your own or someone else’s), including home addresses, home or mobile phone numbers, or personal e-mail addresses, in order to protect privacy.

The ILA will remove spam, comments that are clearly off-topic, comments or links that promote services or products, or comments or links that involve political campaigning or lobbying.

The ILA views gratuitous links to websites as spam and may remove the content.

Commenting made through ILA Sites, including e-mail or messaging systems, will in no way constitute a legal or official notice or comment to the ILA for any purpose.

The ILA makes every effort to (1) identify the copyright status of digital media (including but not limited to photographs, videos, and textual documents) featured on ILA Sites, and (2) use digital media from the public domain or under an open license in publishing content on ILA sites.

The ILA recognizes that copyright laws applicable in the United States may not be applicable in all jurisdictions throughout the world. As a result, the ILA strongly recommends careful examination of copyright-related details prior to reuse of any digital media posted on the ILA Sites. If any media on the ILA Sites are discovered to lack attribution, please contact the ILA directly.

The ILA further recognizes that some digital copies of public domain works have copyrights attached to them, or restrictions applied on their use, regardless of whether the underlying work is in the public domain. The question of whether there should be a distinction in rights status between (1) the underlying work (i.e., the actual original work itself such as the words of a book, the actual physical painting or drawing, a musical score, etc.), or (2) the digital copy (i.e., the digital reproduction of the original work through a medium by which the underlying work makes its way into the wonderful world of Interwebs) is a source of frequent legal debate. And whether an individual or institution can legally apply copyright to a simple digital reproduction of a public domain work is, ILA believes, highly questionable.

The ILA strongly endorses OpenGLAM Principles in the sharing of digital copies of public domain works under open licenses. Accordingly, all articles published on ILA Sites are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. 

Copyright Policy Attribution: The Public Domain Review.