Copyright Infringement Policy

Violating our copyrights can make you liable for up to $150,000 in court-awarded damages, and result in your website being banned by Google.

All images and text on this website are copyright by Access Media Group LLC or respective copyright holders. Violation of copyright is a crime under United States law. Copyrights are also enforceable in other countries as a result of international treaties, provisions of which provide protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Acceptable Use. You may print pages of our website for your own personal use. That is the only acceptable reproduction of our copyrighted material. You may also link from your website to any page(s) on this website.

Unacceptable Use. Any other use of our text and/or graphics constitutes copyright infringement. Use of our material is illegal even if you mention All About Vision as the source, or include the author's byline.

All About Vision continually monitors the Internet for illegal reproduction of our copyrighted material. We use proprietary methods as well as publicly available tools such as Copyscape. New technology is making it quicker and easier than ever to identify instances of infringement.

Please be aware of our legal rights relative to copyright infringement under U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 504:

• Copyright owners may be awarded "statutory damages" in copyright infringement lawsuits. This means we don't have to prove actual monetary damages.
   
• Courts may award from $750 to $30,000 in statutory damages per infringed work, at the Court's discretion.
   
• When infringement is committed willfully, the Court may award statutory damages of up to $150,000.

When we find infringement, we will:

• File a notification with Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines that you have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Search engines regularly remove DMCA violators from their database.
   
• Contact you with a demand to immediately remove the infringing material from your website.
   
• File a copyright infringement lawsuit against you, or negotiate an acceptable settlement. Even if you immediately stop using our copyrighted material upon notification by us, we are still entitled to damages for the time our work was used.

If, upon notification of violation, you do not remove the offending content in a timely manner, we will:

• Petition your web host to shut down your account. Most web hosting companies have "abuse" departments to handle such requests.