Site-wide rules and terms of service for Mu-43.com - Micro Four Thirds User Group

1. No personal attacks or insults allowed.
2. Be nice. Rude comments have no place here.
3. Don't use the forums for illegal activity. This includes but is not limited to posting links to or trading pirated photography-related applications.
4. No obscene, hateful, threatening, racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory posts or signatures. Nudity and profanity are also off limits.
5. Discussion of politics and religion is not allowed anywhere on the site. This includes discussion of photography-related politics such as photographers' rights.
6. All transactions in the Marketplace should be photography related.
7. Commercial listings (camera dealers, workshop offerings, etc) should be posted in the Outside Auctions and Commercial Listings forum.
8. Don't spam the forums. Some self-promotion is okay if it follows the guidelines below.
9. It is against our site rules to modify and repost a version of anyone else's image without explicit permission to do so.
10. The moderators at Mu-43 may remove, edit, move or close any thread, post, or posted image.
11. If you object to a moderator action, please PM an admin rather than posting in the open forum about it.
12. Do not embed your affiliate sales codes in forum posts (instant ban).

Rules regarding self-promotion at www.mu-43.com:

1. Members who maintain outside Micro Four Thirds or photography related resources can feel free to promote them in these forums. For example, if you review a Panasonic lens on your site, it is fine to post to notify other members of the review and link to it. These posts should not be repeated, cross-posted, or bumped by the original poster.
2. Threads which promote your photography-related business or services belong in either the "Other Promotions" or "Commercial Vendors" forum (your choice). Again, such posts should not be repeated, cross-posted, or bumped by the original poster.
3. Feel free to use your signature to link to your personal blog or photography-related website, but do not spam the forum with posts to get your links up.
4. Do not use your signature for other promotion including but not limited to coupon codes or a business unrelated to photography.
5. If you're selling a product, do not multiple post, PM, or email members about it.

If you have a question about whether your post is going to violate the rules and guidelines above, please contact a moderator before making the post.


Regarding copyright (applies to all sections of our site including forums, blogs, groups, contests, gallery, and review section) and our rules related to copyright:

• By posting your own words or images one this site, you are giving permission for those words or image to be shown in the place where you posted them.
• Once posted/uploaded to mu-43.com, your words and images are available to the general public. I have no control over and offer no protection against how anyone utilizes your posts and/or images after obtaining them at mu-43.com, nor can I help you to delete your posts from the internet (Google cache, etc). For all intents and purposes, when you post something here, it is unretractable as with any other forum readable by the public on the internet.
• It is against our site rules to modify and repost a version of anyone else's image without explicit permission to do so.*
• If you would like to grant limited permission for others to edit and repost your images, for critique/illustration purposes, within the same thread where it was originally posted, click here to edit your profile details, scroll to the bottom, check 'OK' under 'Image edit and repost permission', and save changes. "IMAGE EDITING OK" will then be shown next to your name in each of your posts to indicate this preference. This setting does not otherwise affect copyright.
• Do not post anyone else's work, modified or otherwise, in any mu-43 forum, gallery, blog, group, review, or other site section without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.*
• Do not embed anyone else's images from our gallery, blogs, groups, reviews, or other site section in a forum post without explicit permission from the copyright holder.*
• If you post someone else's copyrighted work in the forums, please specify the nature of your use (used with permission of copyright holder, used under creative commons license, etc) and be sure attribute the work properly. Attached/embedded images thought to violate copyright will be deleted.

* Contrary to popular belief, none of these actions are definitively covered under the doctrine of "fair use". To learn more about fair use, a nebulous doctrine developed through numerous and contradictory US court cases over the years, see this U.S. Copyright Office webpage. Although I realize that a case could be made for fair use in some specific situations, Mu-43.com is a privately owned and maintained site, and the above rules are our rules.


Regarding the gallery and attachments:

• Our Gallery space is intended as a space for members to upload their Micro Four Thirds photographs. We understand that there will be certain exceptions, for example a body of work made primarily using MFT but containing a few images made using a different system. As resources are limited, please respect this guideline and limit non-MFT photograph uploads to a minimum.
• The current limit for gallery storage is 100MB per member. Site supporters (donors) get 500MB of storage.
• The current limit for attachments storage is 10MB per member (50MB for site supporters). You can manage your attachments in your user control panel or by clicking here.
• Storage and bandwidth have an associated cost. As time goes on and the forum grows, the file size limits and total per-member storage limits may be significantly adjusted to match what we can afford to pay. This includes both storage in our Gallery as well as forum post attachment storage.
• Example: Say you have 100MB of uploaded images in your mu-43 member gallery, and we subsequently find that I can only afford to give each member 20MB of total storage, you may lose 80MB of your uploaded photos when I make that change.
• Therefore, please do not use mu-43 as the sole archive of your images. We cannot be responsible for lost images stored on this site.
• You can help keep bandwidth costs lower for everyone by not using mu-43 as a place to store images for display on other sites. Eventually, we may have to flip a switch to prevent this altogether. For now, we just ask that members be considerate in their practices.