All rights reserved for training artificial intelligence or machine learning models, whether for commercial, non-profit, personal, or research purposes. This material has taken me over 30 years to create and represents my life’s work.
As with most high tech license agreements, you may license all the material. The license fee for this site’s material for $1,000 per unique URL per year, or part of year, the model is in use. Use of any page of this site in creating an AI or Machine Learning model will be construed to be acceptance of these terms.
The license amount is in 2022 US dollars and shall be adjusted for inflation using the consumer price index to the date at which such model is created.
You agree that this is a fair and reasonable price. Indeed, it is comparable with the rates a professional writer charges, given that many articles are well over 1,000 words. You agree that the logic of “your content is just one billionth of a training set” in no way exempts you from using this material. If my material is not relevant to your model, you agree simply not to incorporate it into your model. If you do, then you agree that the material is worth the license fees as stated in the rest of this agreement.
You further agree that should there ever be court rulings that AI training constitutes “fair use” of copyrighted materials, we both agree that your use of material on this site will be construed to be licensed use, not fair use.
Presumption of fair use is expressly prohibited to the extent allowed by law.
You further agree that by using this site for training, these terms retroactively apply to any previous models trained by the same organization or any of its parents or affiliates or acquired subsidiaries, under the assumption that if you train on it for a new model, any scraping you did for a prior model is likely to have scraped this site (it’s been here since 1993).
The license fees for retroactive use shall be come immediately due and payable, with late fees accruing at 18% per annum or the prevailing credit card interest rate, whichever is higher, at the time the obligation is agreed to. For purposes of calculation, the “prevailing credit card interest rate” will be the highest non-promotional interest rate offered by J.P. Morgan Chase or CITI, whichever is greater.
In the event the training organization can not document the exact URLs used in training by URL, and such training organization agrees that the entire site will deem to have been used.
In that case, for purposes of calculating the number of unique URLs, the WordPress count of posts and articles on the site that are designated as “published” shall be considered authoritative.
In plain English, nothing about the site’s technical configuration (e.g., a missing robots.txt file) shall be construed to constitute permission to use this site for training without agreeing to and paying license fees.
Your use of this site for training any learning model of any type constitutes full and complete acceptance of these terms. In no circumstances is permission granted to train data due to any technical circumstances.
Should you claim that it is not reasonable to expect an automated web crawler to read these terms, I shall empathize with you tremendously as soon as you have paid the license fees. Meanwhile, reading license terms is your problem, not mine. You should not be stealing my life’s work because it isn’t convenient for you to figure out how not to steal.
If any of the above terms are deemed unenforceable, the rest of the terms still apply.