Welcome to our website! We encourage you to read, watch and engage with the content on our site responsibly and ethically. Our Terms of Use isn’t very complicated, nor is it full of legal mumbo-jumbo. If you’re using our site in any way, for yourself, your company or any other entity, you’re agreeing to these terms. If you wish not to agree with them, you must not use our site. Simple. So here are the Terms and Conditions:
This site is owned and operated by The Learning Network, LLC, a Nevada-based, United States Limited Liability Corporation located in Henderson, NV 89052 and reachable by telephone at 978-291-1250 and by numerous contact forms throughout this website. We also operate under the “d/b/a” Matthew Ferrara, Philosopher, Photographer, Speaker. That’s us.
“You” are anybody, individual or representing an entity such as a corporation, organization, or other collective group, who visit, navigate, read, copy, paste, share, save, link-to or comment on, fill out forms or otherwise engage with this website. From anywhere on planet Earth. That’s you.
You agree that we hold the copyright and all related publication rights to everything that we have created, originated and added to this website, with the obvious limitation of anything we link-to or embed from our friends, partners, clients or third-party entities for which we have permission. So, our blog content, videos and photographs are clearly ours. Links to videos, websites and other resources that are owned by others are clearly theirs. None of it is clearly yours, even any comments you add to our blog or interactive areas of our site. Once you add it here, it’s ours. Simple.
You can use all of the things that are OURS for your personal benefit. This means you can read it, watch it, learn from it, apply it to your own activities. You can even use it “in your job” or at work, insofar as it teaches you something new to know, do, act or otherwise apply. You can even share the content, such as blogs, photos, videos and information with others individually and at your company, via copy, paste, link, and where indicated specifically, by embedding it. As long as you’re clearly sharing it as “something you found at www.matthewferrara.com” belonging to us, then you can use and share it. You CANNOT however use any of this content in any way that pretends or portrays that it’s your content, that you created it, that you own it, and that you charge or earn a fee for in any way. With the exception of the very simple “fair use” provision of the U.S. Copyright Law, you agree that nothing accessible to you herein confers upon you any rights, ownership, copyright or other claim.
You agree that if you use anything on this site, you’ll use it responsibly and ethically, and comply with any and every applicable law, both domestic and foreign, that governs your use of it. We agree similarly to produce and distribute content that follows the laws and regulations of the United States of America, that apply to our business and the ability to operate this website.
Our site uses cookies. There, we said it. Yes, there are little bits of code that we use to track very basic things like where you entered our site, what you looked at, how long you looked at it, and where you went next, and when you left. We also use cookies for those clients who log into private or password-protected parts of our site we create to store and share content for our work together. The cookie is used to store your password to save you time logging in, and it’s also used to track who is accessing these password sites. And that’s really about it. I’m sure we could use cookies for lots of other stuff, but we don’t. We want to know who is visiting and if they’ve been here before and what they like and what else we can create to help further. But we’re not in the business of watching you live, tracking you after you leave, or following you around the internet later. We’re too busy making things to help you create a better career and personal life that we wouldn’t have time to do all of that anyway. Oh, and just in case you were worried about it, we suppose that some of our partners like YouTube and Vimeo and Instagram use cookies to track if you watch our videos we store on their sites or look at the photos we share on them. But other than basically reading their traffic reports, we don’t know or have any control over what they do with those cookies: You can visit their websites to learn more if that concerns you.
Privacy is important to us. That’s why we do everyone possible to make it simple and clear and consistent when we ask you for any information, such as your name, email or phone number when contacting us in a form. When you send a message from one of our forms, it goes to our email where we apply standard and strict business practices to keep your message and personal contact information safe. When you sign up for our newsletter, it goes directly to our MailChimp account, where they also use standard and strict business practices to protect your contact information for our newsletters. When you register to comment on our blog, our website host Squarespace also uses standard and strict methods to protect your contact information as a subscriber or commenter to our blog. Other than that, we don’t share, rent, distribute or otherwise provide your contact information to anybody. We do our best to use effective passwords, data protection policies, and antivirus and anti-hacking tools on our computers. If for any reason we have a spreadsheet or database of contact information such as our newsletter or blog commenter list, we keep it on our internal systems carefully safeguarded or on equally safe online cloud storage such as Dropbox. In any case, should we ever have an unintentional breach of our computers or accounts in which your personal contact information or private information of some kind is breached, we will do our very best to let you know. Period. End of story.
What else? Well, let’s see: We operate under the laws of the State of Nevada, within the United States of America. Should there by any legal questions, that will be the venue for any litigation or arbitration. We do our best to ensure our website is accessible to everyone. And we understand that in some countries there are other laws and restrictions that pertain to how You, someone who visits our website on the Internet, may have to live and act and operate online. If there’s something we can do to make our site easier for you within those jurisdictions, we are interested in learning about it but we cannot promise to take any actions beyond what we are able and required to do as a Nevada and United States of America entity.
If there’s something missing here, we aren’t lawyers nor do we really think you’d be reading another twenty paragraphs of legal terms even if we included it. So, we hope we’ve covered the essential terms, that you agree satisfactorily, and we can all get on with our lives.
Not everything in the world can be covered by a terms of agreement, policy or limit of liability. We offer this site, as-is, with the best intentions and lots of hard work. Everything else is called life.