Welcome to online-studio-culture.org, an online academic/professional platform for the interdisciplinary exploration of theories and practices of distant teaching and learning in the visual arts. We hope you will find our efforts informative, inspiring, yet also academically rigorous, and welcome your efforts and contributions towards our aims.

Following is our agreement that we make with you when you use the online-studio-culture.org site; it applies whenever you use the site, whether you’re merely browsing its content, interact with us and/or other users, or in any other situations. These terms govern your use of our site, and set out your rights and obligations. If you can’t/don’t want to accept these terms, then you must not continue using online-studio-culture.org. We will take your continued use of this site to constitute your acceptance of our terms. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand them.

Affiliations

online-studio-culture.org is a personal endeavour of Prof. Peter Benz, who exclusively handles daily operation of the site with occasional support from volunteer helpers. Peter Benz is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU and currently serves as its Associate Director (Teaching and Learning).

Standards and Restrictions

online-studio-culture.org is an online platform that complies with internationally accepted academic standards including but not limited to peer-review, academic freedom and general freedom of expression. We do not limit or restrict the views expressed on our site, unless they are in direct breach with online-studio-culture.org’s House Rules. While we don’t expect and don’t intend to showcase and/or disseminate any unlawful, abusive, obscene, or otherwise offensive content or materials, there is the possibility that some content is not suitable for all audiences. As such suitability is at least partly open to interpretation, you are responsible for complying with any and all local laws in your jurisdiction that may impact your right to use this website.

You need to be 13 years or over to be eligible to register a user account with online-studio-culture.org. If you’re under 13 you will need to be under the supervision of a parent or legal guardian who is at least 18 years of age, and this adult will be responsible for all your activities.

Accessibility

online-studio-culture.org is an open access online publication accessible worldwide; it is also an open community for all academics, professionals, and members of the public who share an interest in our particular area of investigation. We give you permission to use our site and its content in exchange for your acceptance of and compliance with our terms.

All content available on online-studio-culture.org is accessible free of charge, though we may – in the future – charge for some special services (e.g. PDF-downloads). This implies that we give you a revocable, non-exclusive license to access, read, copy, and use the content for personal and/or commercial purposes, as long as you attribute the original author/creator as well as online-studio-culture.org as the original source (i.e. a Creative Commons Attribution (BY)-license). Please refer to the rest of these terms for further details and specifications related to this license.

We’ll try to provide you with long-term access to our content. In any case, we can remove content at our discretion, for example if it becomes out of date or obsolete, or if we need to for legal or business reasons. We will take reasonable steps to let you know if any content was or will be removed, but this might not always be possible depending on the reason for or urgency of the removal.

Keeping our Free Content Free (funding)

online-studio-culture.org currently is a personal endeavour of Peter Benz, who incurs any expenses to its operation. Depending on the future development of online-studio-culture.org, we may at seom point need to refer to some common financing strategies to be able to sustain the operation of online-studio-culture.org. Such strategies may include in particular – but will not be limited to – paid special services and/or advertising.

If any advertising was to be placed on online-studio-culture.org it would be through Google AdSense: we’d set aside space on our pages, and leave it to Google to fill it with ads. Their choice of ads to place on our pages depends on an automated analysis of the textual content of the respective pages, and differs from viewer to viewer, based on the viewer’s individual previous browsing history. If ads are placed in the future online-studio-culture.org will use an option to exclude advertising from some specified categories, yet other than that we have no control over what advertising you will see. We will receive a commission for every page visited that has an ad on it, but it is up to you whether you go on to visit any of the advertisers’ pages or make any purchases of products and services of those other sites. In any case, we don’t endorse any products or services of these other sites, and we don’t accept any responsibility for any of their contents or offerings.

If you like what you see and get from online-studio-culture.org you’re welcome to donate to us. All donations are appreciated with gratitude, and will be used to immediately support the operations of online-studio-culture.org. However, donations will in no way warrant any influence on online-studio-culture.org’s editorial or other decisions, we insist on our unconditional independence.

Ownership and Use

We, or our authors/creators, own or have licensed the rights in the content. We also own the rights in the design, compilation, look and feel of the online-studio-culture.org site. This includes – but is not limited to – intellectual property rights like copyright.

Fair Use

Our “fair use” policy requires that your use of the site, especially of any content you copy or download, must be fair, genuine, and reasonable. For example, we expect that our articles – if used further in an academic context – are properly cited according to academic standards; if our articles are used in educational situations we equally expect to be properly attributed. There are numerous further scenarios how our articles may be further used and utilised, but we hope you get the idea. In cases in which we suspect “unfair use” of our and our contributors’ work, we will use our reasonable discretion to decide whether you have met our “fair use” policy, or whether we need to consider sanctions, e.g. suspending or terminating your access to the site.

Usage Restrictions

Our work, and that of our authors/creators, is based on intellectual property (IP) including copyright. We need to protect our IP for us to keep the trust of our contributors and stakeholders, and thereby maintaining the basis of online-studio-culture.org’s existence. We therefore have to insist that you won’t re-sell, redistribute, frame, repurpose or copy content except within academically common citation frameworks or unless specifically allowed in these terms. While you may utilise and appropriate the knowledge and insights you receive from our content for your personal commercial and non-commercial endeavours, you cannot e.g. re-sell or disseminate content to unreasonable extent. If you like our content, please send others to online-studio-culture.org rather than sending the content to them! The trademarks and logos on the online-studio-culture.org site belong to online-studio-culture.org or to others, and you must not use these without the approval of the owner.

Sources Files

Some of the content published through online-studio-culture.org will include audio-visual materials – like e.g. images – that have their own licenses. While we ensure that we have the licenses to publish those materials on our own website – and in potential subsequent PDFs – these will usually not extend to any parties beyond online-studio-culture.org. This means if you want to use or redistribute any of these files you need to get your own licenses from the original owners.

Restricting Access

We may restrict, suspend or terminate your access to our website and/or shop at any time at our discretion if we decide you’ve breached these terms or any law that applies. We’ll be reasonable in exercising our discretion and making such a decision. In particular, your access to our shop will be suspended or terminated if payment is reversed by the payment agent.

Intellectual Property Concerns

We respect the IP rights of others, including those who have contributed in any way to our site and its content. Please contact us if you believe that your intellectual property or other rights are being affected by anything on the site.

If you are specifically making a copyright-based claim about content, please send the following information to mail@online-studio-culture.org:

– your name and contact details (i.e. your address, telephone number, and email address);
– a description of the location of the alleged infringing material;
– a description of the copyright work that has been allegedly infringed (the “source”);
– a statement by you that you warrant that the information given in your claim is accurate and that you are either the copyright owner or are authorised to act on the copyright owner’s behalf; and
– your physical or valid electronic signature.

User-generated Content

We imagine online-studio-culture.org to develop into a lively online community and discussion platform for all matters concerning academic and professional exchange related to remote teaching and learning practices in creative practices, and therefore encourage you to participate in any online-studio-culture.org dialogues. Often you’ll have the opportunity to comment or post your views on our site. You retain ownership of any intellectual property in your content but by posting it on online-studio-culture.org you give us permission (a license) to use it on our site. This permission includes allowing us to publish it (or not), to feature it, to move it to a more appropriate forum, and to store or delete it. For a few basic rules regarding nature and content of comments, please visit our House Rules.

Legal Housekeeping

In using online-studio-culture.org you agree that you will not:

– use a false email address, impersonate others, or misrepresent your affiliation with others;
– attempt to gain unauthorized access to computer systems or materials from or through online-studio-culture.org;
– engage in automatic gathering of information from or through online-studio-culture.org (such as “spidering”, “screen scraping”, “database scraping” or harvesting of e-mail addresses);
– attempt to interrupt or alter online-studio-culture.org’s operation in any way (for example through sending mass unsolicited messages, “flooding” servers, or introducing a virus, time bomb, trojan horse, worm, cancelbot or other computer routine);
– use KOKO or any of its content in a way that violates applicable law, that violates the intellectual property or other rights of us or others, or that is fraudulent, obscene, offensive, misleading, or defamatory;
– use scripts to automatically mass download content;
– insert advertising, branding or other promotional content into the site or content; and/or
– except as allowed in these terms, copy, distribute, transmit, modify or otherwise exploit content, data or code on the sites.

Privacy

Our information collection and use of any personal information is set out in our Privacy Policy. We can only use personal information that you disclose in relation to your use of online-studio-culture.org for certain purposes explained in our Privacy Policy. At no point will we pass on your details to others except to satisfy a law, regulation or government request; especially we won’t sell your details to marketing companies or similar. However, please bear in mind that any information that you post on our site will become public information and can be collected and used by other parties.

Liability and Disclaimer

There may be consumer laws where you live (‘non-excludable consumer laws’). We don’t purport to exclude or modify them if they apply.

Except as required by a non-excludable consumer law:

– we are only bound by the express promises we make in these terms. We’re not bound by implied terms;
– we don’t promise that the content or your access to online-studio-culture.org will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any defects will be corrected, or that the site or content are free of viruses or any other harmful components;
– we don’t make any promises about (and we’re not liable for) your access to or reliance on online-studio-culture.org or its content in terms of correctness, accuracy, timeliness, completeness, reliability or otherwise;
– we’re not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, loss or revenue or loss of profits which result from any use of or access to, or any inability to use or access online-studio-culture.org or its content; and
– to the fullest extent permitted by law, our liability for breach of any warranty or condition which cannot be excluded is limited, at our option, to either replacement or paying the cost of replacement.

Access and Availability

We’ll try to make sure that you have 24/7 access to online-studio-culture.org; if nonetheless necessary, we’ll try to keep any downtime to a minimum. We may need to interrupt or suspend access to the site or the provision of the site’s services and content, for maintenance, technical or other reasons but we’ll make every effort to be quick.

Taxes, Fees and Charges

You are responsible for paying all fees and taxes associated with your use of online-studio-culture.org wherever levied (including withholding tax, if applicable).

Changes to Terms

We can change these terms at any time but we’ll do our best to post information about any changes on the site. If you continue to use online-studio-culture.org after the terms changed, you will be accepting the new or revised terms.

Interpretation

Words like ‘include’ and ‘including’ are not words of limitation and where anything is within our discretion we mean our sole discretion (unless these terms say otherwise).

Applicable Laws

online-studio-culture.org is controlled and operated by Peter Benz, who lives and works in Hong Kong. Therefore the laws of Hong Kong govern these terms, and you and online-studio-culture.org submit to the jurisdiction of the courts there.

Congratulations! You’ve reached the end. Thanks for taking the time to learn about online-studio-culture.org’s terms of use. Please, enjoy your time on our site!