Terms of Use
Critical Monk (www.criticalmonk.com) is my personal website. This page lists the terms the site runs on.
There was no reason to write it in the language of lawyers, so it is written plainly instead. Opening the site, reading it, listening to it or using anything here means these terms are acceptable to you. If some part of them is not, closing the page is the simplest answer, and no offence is taken.
What this site is
One person's website. Not a company, not an institution, not a team.
Whatever goes up here, the writing, the things I build, the things to listen to, the small tools, goes up because I wanted to make it. You need no account to read or use any of it, and it costs nothing. If some part of the site ever comes with its own rules or a price attached, that will be stated where it lives, not slipped in quietly.
What you can do
- Read, listen to and use anything here, for yourself, as often as you like.
- Send a link to any page wherever you want, to a friend, into a group, onto your own site. Sharing a link needs no permission from me.
- Quote a passage somewhere, as long as it is a passage rather than the whole thing, with my name and a link back to the page it came from. That is enough.
- Use what is here in your study, your classroom or your own private work, without asking.
What you should not do
- Republish my writing or my work under your own name, or copy a whole piece across to another site.
- Crawl the site with bots, scrapers or anything automated. It slows the pages down for everybody else.
- Break into, tamper with or interfere with any part of how the site works.
- Use the name Critical Monk to pass yourself off as me, or to suggest that something of yours is connected to this site.
- Use anything from here for a purpose that is against the law or that causes harm to someone.
Where any of that turns up, I can block the access behind it and take it further if the situation calls for it.
Content and rights
What is mine
The text I write, the code I write, the design, and the things I made myself: the rights to those stay with me. Beyond the permissions above, ask me before putting them to commercial use. The answer is usually yes. Being asked is the part that matters.
What is not mine
The site may also carry material whose rights belong to other people: someone else's recording, someone else's writing, someone else's work, or a player loaded in from another service.
Whatever belongs to somebody stays theirs. Sitting on this site does not make it mine, and it does not hand you any right over it either. Which leads to one simple rule: do not take something from here and pass it on as your own, whether it was mine or somebody else's to begin with.
If something should not be here
If you hold the rights to some material and believe it does not belong on this site, write to me. Say what it is, which page it is on, and how the rights are yours.
My way of handling this is straightforward: it comes down first, and the discussion happens afterwards. No lawyer's letter is needed and no argument is expected. The same goes if you believe a page says something about you that is wrong.
No affiliation
This website is my own and speaks in my own voice. It has no official connection to any organisation, trust, foundation or institution, and nothing written here should be read as a statement made on behalf of one.
This is not advice
What is here is for reading, listening and looking inward. It does not stand in for a doctor, a therapist, a lawyer or a financial adviser, and it was never written with that intention.
Do not base a decision about your life on something you read on this site. And if you are in a situation where you need help now, speak to someone near you or to a professional. A website is no use there, however good the intention behind it.
Whether the site keeps running
The aim is for everything to keep working and to stay correct. Even so:
- Pages can go down, slow down, or disappear for a while for some technical reason.
- Anything here can be changed, corrected or removed, and there is no obligation to announce it first.
- The information here is kept as accurate as I can keep it, but I cannot guarantee that it is right at every moment. Spot a mistake and tell me, and I will fix it.
The site is available as it is. No promise comes attached that it will work for any particular purpose of yours.
Outside links and services
Some pages link outward, and in places a player or a piece of content loads in from another service.
Those services are not under my control. Their own terms and their own privacy policy apply there rather than mine, and what happens to you on somebody else's site is not my responsibility.
What you send me
An email you send me, or a comment you leave, is yours and stays yours. What happens to the information inside it is set out in the privacy policy.
- Nothing you write to me is made public without asking you first, not even unnamed.
- Keep comments civil. Abuse, threats, hatred, advertising or somebody's private details get removed, and no explanation follows.
- If you send me a suggestion or an idea and it later turns into something, no claim over that arises for you. It reads harshly written down, and it is still better said in advance than argued about afterwards.
Limits of responsibility
You use this site on your own judgement.
If something you read or used here costs you something, your time, your money, or anything else, that loss is not mine to carry, except as far as the law does not allow me to say so.
That is not a clever clause. Put plainly, a free website built by one person cannot take responsibility for the decisions in someone else's life.
Law
These terms are governed by the law of India, and any dispute goes before the courts in Agra, Uttar Pradesh.
If one of these terms turns out to be unenforceable for some reason, the rest of them carry on as they are.
Changes to these terms
The site will change, so this page will change with it. Whenever it does, the date at the top changes too. Carrying on using the site after a change means the new terms are acceptable to you.
Contact
Questions about these terms, or about something on the site:
Write to
info.monkza@gmail.comA reply usually arrives within three days, and the contact page has a form if that suits you better.