Terms of Use
Last updated 14 February 2008.
Welcome to WhatNotToSing.com (http://www.whatnottosing.com). Our Terms of Use are simple, to the point, modestly entertaining in places, and free of most of the legalese you will find on other sites. Therefore, we feel it's not too much to ask that you read them in full.
Legal Agreement
These terms comprise a legal agreement between you, the visitor, and us, WhatNotToSing.com. If you do not abide by them, then you cannot use our site. Simple as that.
The WhatNotToSing.com team owns and operates this website. We are not affiliated in any way with American Idol, Fox Television, Fox Interactive Media, 19 Entertainment, or Fremantle Media. We occasionally refer to ourselves colloquially on our site as WNTS.com to save a few keystrokes; however, this is purely a practice of convenience. We are not affiliated with any organization whose formal name is WNTS or WNTS.com, whoever or whatever they might be.
Usage and Copyrights
The WhatNotToSing.com team maintains this website for our visitors' personal enjoyment, education, research, and entertainment. All original material on the site (ratings, analyses, articles, descriptions, opinions, etc.) is protected by international copyright and trademark laws.
Having said that, we're happy to allow our ratings data to be reproduced and used on open websites or in the media, within reasonable limits and provided you cite us as the source. For example, if you wish to publish the latest AI episode's approval ratings on your blog, on an open forum, or in a newspaper article, you're free to do so. You may settle an online argument (or try to, anyway) as to which contestants or performances America liked most by citing the relevant numbers. You may reproduce our Top 10 and Bottom 10 rankings, list a season's contestants by their average ratings, etc. In all cases, you agree to cite WhatNotToSing.com prominently as the source of the data and provide a link to our website if practical.
The rules change for for-fee reproduction, such as (but not limited to) fee-based websites, books, commercial newsfeeds, etc. In these cases, reproduction of any proprietary data from our site is prohibited without our written consent. This is not to imply that our consent is difficult to come by, because it's not; we're usually very honored to grant it. But it does mean that if you intend to package and resell excerpts of our data directly for profit, you have to be polite, raise your hand and ask first. (We do offer several business and advertising services for commercial organizations. Please check them out.)
In all cases, the original prose and images on our website may not be reproduced by anybody for any purpose without our consent, except for brief "fair use" excerpts with proper attribution.
If there is any dispute whatsoever between you and us as to whether your use of our copyrighted material constitutes "fair use", "non-commercial use", "within reasonable limits", etc., you agree that we're right and you're wrong. We told you this was simple.
Our goal here, in case you need this spelled out, is to allow casual readers to use, share, and disseminate the interesting American Idol data we've compiled, while preventing anyone from reproducing large portions of our site elsewhere, or from taking the fruits of our labor and selling it without our permission. If you have any questions or want any of these restrictions clarified, just ask us. Most of us don't bite, and the ones that do have had their shots.
Miscellaneous Stuff
If you plan to contact us for any reason, please read our Privacy Policy carefully first for vital information and disclaimers.
As with all websites, we reserve the right to change our terms and conditions at any time, effective from the femtosecond we update this document. If we make what we feel are any significant changes, we'll also note them on our home page. You agree to abide by all changes moving forward.
We don't employ hidden contracts or "Gotcha!" waivers on our WNTS.com visitors, and we don't play nicely with anyone who tries to do so with us. We respect other parties' Terms Of Use and copyright policies (observe, for example, how few American Idol images and videos you find on our site), and we expect our visitors and correspondents to do the same for ours. Note particularly: The only waivers and agreements legally binding to us are ones we write out to a specific party and sign, explicitly containing the words "we agree to...", "you have our permission...", or something similar, and written in such a clear, fully aware, and unambiguous manner that everyone from a Supreme Court justice to the janitor at your local county courthouse would read it and say, "Yup, that's good." To be honest, we find it sort of nauseating that we have to include this paragraph in our otherwise good-faith, fair and open Terms, but such is the world we live in today, we guess.
Finally, we offer no warranties either explicit, implied, full, or limited, for any of the information on our website, nor regarding the accuracy of our database, nor for any purpose or usage that you or anyone else on God's green earth can dream up. If, to give just one example, you get into an argument with your boyfriend over who sang A Little Less Conversation better, Jon Peter Lewis or Chris Daughtry, and you come to our site to settle the matter, and when he sees the results he gets angry and breaks up with you, then...tough. You're probably better off without him anyway.
-- The staff of WNTS.com
