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The Terms of Use section of most any website is usually an overlong, long-winded babble of legal jargon that all boils down to a simple message: Please Don’t Sue Us. Legal jargon exists mainly to protect the pockets of someone who may or may not have been caught doing something he or she should not have done, and to protect a person or entity from their own bad judgment.

PraiseNet.Org is not owned by a corporation or major ministry with deep pockets. Donations to the site are extremely rare and come in the form of a few bucks here and there which does not come close to covering the true operating costs of maintaining this site. The site is basically a blog on steroids, intended to educate, enlighten and inform through the presentation of a variety of views and using a variety of voices proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No one earns a salary or makes any profit from this ministry, which is paid for out of the pockets of a faithful few and the occasional generosity of the site’s audience.

To that end, we may have acted naively if not stupidly in using certain non-free works for the purposes of (legal jargon) criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, while assuming the respective copyright owner(s) of those works would simply contact us if they preferred we didn’t feature their work. This practice has come to be known as a Creative Commons License or CCL, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC). We now see hundreds of thousands of blogs of varying levels of creative value and integrity posting all kinds of things, not to mention Facebook which has hundreds of millions of users posting pretty much whatever they please, usually without attribution or concern for those whose hard work made such creativity possible. This is not what we do, and we do not use the poor practice of others as a defense for being dumb or irresponsible on our part.

There is a line in our Terms of Use that says the site is non-commercial, which means we do not make a profit from it nor do we restrict access or sell ad space. We believe ads distract from and compromise our message as well as undermine the non-commercial nature of this online ministry.

The legal language states the site exists for editorial and promotional purposes, which really isn’t true. This site exists to tell people Who Jesus is and to do that in as creative a fashion as we are able with no budget. In many if not most cases, the promotional aspect of our use refers to promoting and exposing the work of the creative content; not promoting us, but providing a venue and platform for the wonderful work we encounter.

In today’s highly litigious atmosphere, the kind of naiveté we’ve practiced—in assuming a kind of civility and flexibility toward non-commercial use on a religious platform—is an expensive risk. We are, therefore, in the process of reevaluating every comma, every semicolon on this site, inspecting everything in terms of the vulnerability it presents to the work of the Gospel this site is intended to represent.

All of which means: Please Don’t Sue Us.
There is no deep pocket. No corporate bank account. No acres of land or other assets to go after. There’s just a couple guys spending their lunch money (and, at times, their rent money) talking about Jesus Christ, Who He Is and Why He Matters. We’ve intend absolutely no one any harm and will cheerfully remove any work not specifically owned by us upon request. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Now, onto the useless legal jargon.