Some legal and copyright issues
concerning the Trento Bike Pages


By Thomas Driemeyer, August 2005. The text is largely copied from the original maintainer of the Trento Bike pages, Andreas Caranti; written in 1/1996 and 2/1996.

In this page I intend to touch upon some legal and copyright issues concerning the Trento Bike Pages. Please note that Internet Law, a rather difficult subject, is currently in the making, and I'm no expert.

Who's responsible here

Note first of all that the Trento Bike Pages are my responsibility alone. Andreas Caranti is no longer involved in the maintenance of these pages in any way, and neither is his university or any other organization. This is a personal and completely noncommercial volunteer effort.

Status of the pages

The cycling pages you can access directly via the Trento Bike Pages fall roughly into two categories. Some pages are set up locally, whereas some others reside elsewhere, and are just linked to here. Note that some of the links, most notably those to in the Other Cycling Resources and Search Engines sections, refer to self-contained, totally independent resources.

Local Pages

The pages that reside here were either sent me by their authors for me to post, or were obtained from other sources (a newsgroup, say), and are posted with the explicit permission of the author.

I usually do some kind of technical editing to these pages (turning text into HTML, adding titles, splitting up long reports in chapters and adding indices, etc). Authors retain full rights on their contributions, even when thus reworked, and can reuse them in this form. I only ask that they are still kept freely available.

Responsibility for the content of local pages basically remains with their authors. I try to make sure to the best of my knowledge that local pages do not contain material that may lead to any potential legal issue, but I'm quite willing to examine any complaints.

External pages

Pages linked to here, but residing elsewhere, are clearly beyond my control, so the authors retain full rights and responsibility.

When I set up a link to an external page I usually inform the author. Occasionally I may fail to do so, or fail to obtain feedback from the author. I work under the assumption that people who post pages on the Web do so because they want people to read them. By setting up links to pages, I give my contribution to their visibility. However, if an author does not want her/his page to be linked to here, it's enough to drop me a line for me to remove a link.

Also note that this site contains a very large number of links. I cannot check whether those links go bad and the linked information disappears, or is replaced with inappropriate material. For example, I will remove links to pages taken over by spammers or other offensively commercial material when I learn about them. If you notice such a link, please tell me!

Users Beware

Copying information that floats freely on the Web is easy. Keeping a copy for personal use is OK. More than that is very likely to be unadvisable.

For instance, editing original documents and circulating them in a new form is definitely to be discouraged, as it infringes the copy rights held by the author. Deleting the name of the author of a document in your own copy (yes, I've seen that happen!) is clearly seriously wrong.

If you are in doubt, consult the author before tampering with any of her/his documents. Remember that even when documents are provided for free, this doesn't mean that the author relinquishes her/his rights on them.

Impressum

German law requires that the maintainer of a web site supplies information about the maintainer. I think that only applies to commercial sites, but I got this free template so here we go:

Anbieter: Thomas Driemeyer
Adresse: Linienstraße 215, 10119 Berlin
Telefon: 030-89377331
Email: tbp5@trentobike,.org
Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer entfällt; dieses Angebot ist eine private Homepage und ich habe keine USt-Nummer.

Inhaltlich Verantwortlicher gemäß §10 Absatz 3 MDStV: Thomas Driemeyer (Anschrift wie oben).

Haftungshinweis: Trotz sorgfältiger inhaltlicher Kontrolle übernehme ich keine Haftung für die Inhalte externer Links. Für den Inhalt der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich deren Betreiber verantwortlich.