Legal Notices
This is the stuff that you either never read, or stare at blankly for a few seconds. But the United States is a nation of laws, so it’s here if you ever need it. We’ve tried to write it using plain language, but you’ll need to judge that for yourself.
Credits
Thank you to the following:
Underware
A typefoundry based in Finland and the Netherlands, run by Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemäki. They designed the Zeitung typeface family used on this website. Zeitung is one of the first typefaces to take advantage of OpenType Variations technology. You can license Zeitung and the rest Underware’s typefaces directly from their website at www.underware.nl.
Christelle
For giving kind permission to use one of her photographs on our HTTP 404 Error page. Few people will ever see this page, but it’s there if you ever need it.
Jurisdiction
This website is subject to the federal laws of the United States, the state laws of California, and local laws of Orange County.
Copyright
The content and designs on this website are the property of Uselesstuff®. We reserve all of our rights. To the best of our knowledge, all the artworks published here are original designs.
All third-party content is clearly attributed, and is used by permission of the respective owners.
Trademarks
The name Uselesstuff®, the uselesstuff and useless wordmark logos, the u logo, and the phrase the name says it all are registered trademarks of Uselesstuff®.
All other registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Parody & Fair Use
Many of our designs are parodies. Sometimes a design may be a parody of a third party’s copyrighted work. In America this is free speech, and is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Parody of copyrighted work is also protected by federal Fair Use laws.
United States Constitution – First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Click here for more information about the First Amendment.
United States Code – Title 17 – Section 107
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include –
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Privacy
What We Do
Our privacy policy is very simple: to treat you with the same respect as we’d like to be treated ourselves. That means we will never disclose your information to any third party, except under legal obligation.
In other words: we have enough going on in our own lives, to worry about what’s going on in yours.
What the Online Services We Use Do
However, it is important to understand that the third-party online services we use have varying privacy policies. How they choose to respect your personal privacy is mostly beyond our direct control, but we do take action where we can.
With this in mind, there’s good news and bad news. First, the good news.
There are two ways you can visit a website: you can use an open (HTTP) connection, or an encrypted (HTTPS) connection. If you use an open connection, anyone between you and the website – that includes your internet service provider, and other random or unwelcome observers – can see what you’re doing. If you use an encrypted connection, only you and the website you’re visiting can see what you’re doing.
Uselesstuff® uses encrypted HTTPS connections by default. Even if you try to connect to our website using an open HTTP connection, we’ll automatically switch you to an encrypted connection.
Now, the bad news.
Normal cookies are delicious, especially the ones studded with lots of chocolate chips. But the word cookie is also used for a method of storing personal data when you use the world wide web. Web cookies – also called HTTP cookies – are an entirely different matter, and are not that appetizing.
When cookies first appeared on the world wide web in 1994, we were immediately skeptical about how they would be used. Cookies can store any type of information, but they have two popular uses:
- To know who you are. This is very useful, especially if you need to do anything secure or confidential. For example, if you ever do your banking or buy things online, cookies help that website correctly identify who you are. Combined with HTTPS encryption, cookies have made the internet the marketplace of ideas, services and products that it is today.
- To know who you are. Since cookies can identify who you are, many online companies use them to follow you around the internet. This type of cookie is called a tracking cookie. Think of it as the digital equivalent of stalking.
The tracking cookie has also made the internet what it is today. The best way to understand it is to compare it to a real-life example. You probably don’t like others reading over your shoulder. Now imagine if these other people not only read over your shoulder, but followed you everywhere for your entire life, taking notes, pictures and recordings of everything you did, said, and thought.
In most societies, this type of behaviour is condemned at the very least – and is classified as serious crime by many. But in the digital world, people, organizations and governments appear to express little or no opinion about how tracking cookies are used.
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published a book in 1791 describing an system he named the Panopticon: an institution where residents were kept under continual surveillance, but didn’t know when and how. Bentham thought that the Panopticon would be a useful method to encourage good behaviour in people, and recommended it for building schools, hospitals, sanatoriums, asylums, and prisons.
Today, the Panopticon is seen as a method for tracking, observation, and control. Some critics see it as an ideal tool for totalitarians and those intent on exercising power over others. On the internet, the tracking cookie is the most prominent form of contemporary Panopticon in use.
Have you ever noticed how your past web searches seem to follow you around the internet in the form of advertisements? Or how the price of a product you regularly buy seems to increase around the time you actually want to buy it? Or how all of the political and social sites you visit seem to closely match your own opinions? Or how it’s becoming more difficult to meet and speak with interesting people online with different lives and experiences from your own?
Have you also noticed how at some times the social media services you use seem to know more about you than you do yourself? And then in the next moment, they seem to know nothing about you whatsoever? And then how those same services then treat you like a stereotypical parody of yourself?
Some people call this effect the Filter Bubble. You can thank the tracking cookie for that. And the more time you spend online, the worse it’ll get.
Accessibility
We take accessibility very seriously. We use of a variety of technologies to make content accessible: HTML5+CSS3, WAI Aria, Semantic HTML, responsive design, metadata, keywords, and image and video captioning. In doing so, we hope to make our content available to as wide an audience as possible.
However, we do make use of some third-party online services that currently don’t provide all the accessibility features we use ourselves. In these cases, we apologize in advance for not being able to cater to all our customers’ needs.