Copyright at Pens Around the World – Pens Around The World

For the benefit of members and former members of Pens Around the World.

Copyright

At the foot of every page of the website you will find the following statement:

This means that all individual members (and former members) of Pens Around the World own the copyright in everything they publish on the site. Anything that is not identified as the work of an individual author (as for example this text) is copyright to Pens Around the World collectively.

This applies to everything on the site “unless otherwise stated”. If you are publishing other people’s work, for example photographs or illustrations you did not make yourself, you should include a statement to this effect and a link back to the original author and/or the site where the image you have borrowed originates. This is most important for material published on the public facing pages of the website (in Blog posts).

Control

All current members have full control over whatever they publish on the site.

In our private Forums members can always selectively edit what we have published (Topics and Replies) using the Edit button. We can also selectively delete what we have written using the Delete button. But see the Important Note below.

In our public Blog posts, we can always selectively edit what we have published from the dashboard. We can also change the visibility of a published piece (to make it private) or “unpublish it” by switching it back to draft. From the Posts dashboard we can also Bin a post which effectively deletes it. But see the Important Note.

Important Note to Members

Although you hold the copyright in your own writing published on the site, you do not have any rights over other people’s writing.

In the private Forums, if you have started a discussion thread (called a Topic), as the original author you can also delete that Topic. This will remove your original post, but also any of the threaded Replies by other people. Please respect other people’s copyright; do not delete a Topic without discussing it with the administration. If you feel you must remove your material, instead of deleting the Topic, choose to Edit the initial post. You can, for example, remove all the material in the post and replace it with a statement such as: “Text removed by the author.”

In the public facing Blog, if you decide to remove a post:

any Comments that people may have added to your text will also be lost. You own the copyright in your blog post, but you do not own the copyright in others’ comments.
any Links you, other people, or search engines (such as Google) may have created to the post will also be lost. This may damage the website’s standing on the Internet.

For these reasons, if you want to delete a blog post, we ask that you discuss what you want to do with the administration.

Former Members

Should you decide to move on from Pens Around the World, once you have left you will no longer have the opportunity to edit or delete material you have published on the site. We hope you will choose to leave your material in our database to allow other members continued access to what you once wrote in the Forums. If you do not wish to do that, we ask, before you apply to end your membership, that you carry out a review of your Topics and Replies and selectively edit your published items, taking care not to delete other people’s writing.

We also hope you will allow your published Blog posts to remain in our website’s archive. To this end we have created the “Friend of Pens” page and “Guest Blogger” status which allow us to continue to identify you as the author of your pieces. They also allow us to keep links open between us and you, and for you to update your profile information from time to time (for example with links to newly published works) by contacting the administration.

This page created on 25 March 2023 and most recently updated 25 March 2023