Legal Terms
Scope and ApplicabilityDisclaimersTerms of UsePrivacy PolicyNetiquette
Scope and Applicability
Scope
The following disclaimers and rules are applicable to Ex Astris Scientia (EAS) and, unless otherwise noted, to The Starfleet Museum, the Advanced Starship Design Bureau (ASDB), the Journal of Applied Technology (JoAT) and any other sites in the EAS Network, collectively referred to as "site" in the following. Please note that some of the sub-sites have a shared ownership. The legal contact in any case is Bernd Schneider, referred to as "owner" hereafter.
The legal notices are not applicable to hosted sites or to social media pages affiliated with EAS. The rules for the embedded Disqus commenting system are listed on a separate page.
Changes
All of the clauses below may be amended any time without notice. Only their most recent version on the server is valid.
The last update was on 27 Oct 2024.
Disclaimers
General disclaimer
This website is not endorsed, sponsored or affiliated with CBS Studios Inc. or the Star Trek franchise. The Star Trek trademarks and logos are owned by CBS Studios Inc.
Ex Astris Scientia is a non-commercial fan website in the strictest possible definition. Absolutely no profit is made with this site. It is entirely funded by the owner. Any kind of sales, advertising, sponsoring or user donations is hereby explicitly precluded, even if earnings would be solely used to cover expenses necessary for the site's creation, maintenance or hosting.
Content
Star Trek™ and many related terms are registered trademarks of CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Paramount Pictures Inc. No copyright infringement is intended with this site. Copyrighted material from CBS or Paramount has been included under the legally acknowledged terms of "fair use".
All other content is, to the owner's best knowledge, used with the explicit consent of the respective copyright owners or publishers. In case of objections, please contact the owner.
Liability for content
This site and any information contained therein is provided "as is" and without warranty of any kind. In no event the owner or any of the contributors shall be held responsible for any incomplete, inaccurate or outdated information. There is no "final" version of any content presented at this site. Updates and amendments will take place at any time and without being marked as such.
The decision about the site's content solely lies with the owner. In no event the owner shall be held responsible for removing or amending any content.
The statements and opinions expressed at EAS may coincide with, but do not generally reflect the official views of Paramount Pictures Inc. on the Star Trek franchise. EAS follows the canon policy of Paramount Pictures, meaning that it only accepts on-screen information as authentic, unless otherwise noted. More about this policy can be found in the Canon FAQ and the article "What is Canon?". Any such canon information given at EAS is correct and up to date to the owner's best knowledge, but may remain debatable or subject to be updated in single cases.
This site includes interactively generated content such as guestbooks, commenting sections, polls or lists of user-submitted links. The owner does not assume any liability or responsibility whatsoever for such user-generated content. The content is reviewed with due diligence in reasonable intervals pertaining to its legality. The owner will remove, immediately and without notification, anything that could be illegal. Furthermore, the owner reserves the right to remove any such content that he deems offensive or otherwise inappropriate.
Note that a small amount of the information presented at this site may originate from servers not under the owner's control. This third-party content currently comprises Trek Feeds, EAS Today, Star Trek TV Blog, the Disqus comments and an unspecified number of embedded YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook videos.
This site is not affiliated with the web server on which it resides in any way other than web hosting, and the web hosting service shall not, under any circumstances, be held responsible for the opinions, statements or other content within this website. All inquiries to the legality or other applicable terms and conditions of use of any of the content within this website have to be directed exclusively to the owner.
Technical liability
Neither the owner nor the server administrator shall be held responsible for any harmful effects that viewing of this site may have on a visitor's computer system.
This site does not include any form of advertisements and does not create any pop-up windows.
The third-party content in the form of Trek Feeds, EAS Today, Star Trek TV Blog and the Disqus commenting system may include scripts that are not under the control of the owner. In order to enhance the security and privacy, the Disqus scripts are off by default and are only activated if requested by the user.
External links
Links from this site to external sites do not imply any endorsement or guarantee of content. The owner does not assume any liability or responsibility whatsoever for the operation of, or content at, any of the linked resources, nor for any of the interpretations, comments or opinions expressed therein.
If you think that a site that EAS links to contains illegal or in any way hazardous content, please express your concerns to the owner: Bernd Schneider.
Terms of Use
Copyright
Unless otherwise noted, all text and some of the artwork have been created especially for and are copyright of this site. This content is not public domain! However, it is free to be reproduced by anyone under the following common-sense terms:
1. You republish the material in the form of excerpts. I do not approve of reproductions of entire pages. I do not approve of sites that use my layout graphics or otherwise imitate the look of this site.
2. You give appropriate credit to this site including a hyperlink. I will agree to a mention on a global credit page if you use single graphics or text passages, but I insist on more clearly visible credits in case of more extensive excerpts.
3. For any content that I am showing by courtesy of a third party, you must ask permission from this original source (i.e. from the designer or author who is credited at this site). In particular, this applies to the content of the SF Museum, JoAT, ASDB, Fan Fiction and Canon Fodder. Note that in some cases of contributed material special terms of use may apply!
4. I reserve the right to deny or retract my approval if the material appears in an improper context. This may include, but is not restricted to: political propaganda, promotion of illegal activities, disfiguration or distortion of images taken from this site (no matter if intentionally or accidentally because of bad image editing), misquoting of views and findings from this site, commercial exploitation of this site's content.
The owner reserves the right to sue anyone who uses intellectual property of this site in an illicit fashion, in particular in case of its commercial exploitation.
I appreciate to be informed in advance if you like to use my material under the above terms. I have always agreed so far.
Hotlinking
Hotlinking (loading images directly from this site's server and displaying them on other websites) is only allowed in discussion forums and social media, if the hotlinked image suits the discussion. Hotlinking is generally enabled on the EAS server, but there is a blacklist for cases of misuse. In cases of hotlinking from places on the blacklist the image is automatically replaced by the server with an embarrassing notification that hotlinking is disabled.
For the record: All images posted at EAS are hosted on my own server for whose operation I have to pay for. Off-site content only appears in the form of news feeds or embedded videos.
Spam
Spamming the guestbook, link list, contact form, statistics or other parts of the site is a serious disruption of its operation and is therefore strictly forbidden. Any such entries, in particular those made without any reference to Star Trek or to this site, will be immediately deleted without notice at the sole discretion of the owner.
Likewise, collecting any addresses from this site for sending out unsolicited e-mails or for any commercial purposes is strictly prohibited. The owner reserves to take legal actions against any offenders.
It goes without saying that misusing the domain names owned by me to send out spam mails is utterly criminal identity theft and will be punished. I can take no responsibility for spam that pretends to have been sent out by me (but actually from a spam server that is disguised as my server and can be identified examining the usually hidden parts of the e-mail header). I am sorry, but there is absolutely no technical possibility to avert such criminal activities.
Spidering
Crawling this site with automated tools is allowed if it is used to build a search index. Spidering the site with download tools is generally allowed, but this permission may be suspended any time to avoid excessive traffic loads. Regular spidering of the site (such as for building a mirror) is only allowed with the explicit permission of the owner. The owner reserves the right to permanently disable downloads with certain spider tools or to certain IP ranges.
Submissions
All submitted data in the form of text, images, multimedia or any other formats posted at this site remains the sole intellectual property of the originator. Unless otherwise agreed on, the site owner neither demands co-ownership nor exclusive publishing rights.
When submitting data, contributors grant this site the right to publicly post it irrevocably. Once posted, a visitor submission will only be removed if the site owner deems it useful or if pending legal proceedings explicitly require it.
Visitor submissions to Ex Astris Scientia (EAS) of any kind are always appreciated. Please note that, owing to the complexity of this site, to my work load, to webspace or traffic constraints and to changing priorities I will not be able to take all of them into account, even if they are of high quality.
Linking
With the exception of the illicit image leeching (see above), a link from an external site to this site may be created without explicit permission. However, a link that points to this site does not imply an obligation for the owner to put up a reciprocal link.
The owner disapproves of the following: links from sites with illegal or politically extreme content, links from places that he deems offensive and that are not accessible to the public, links to this site from a defamatory context or from places with misinformation about this site, links to this site using disfigured banners, links that open this site's pages in a frame set or in a window without menu bars, links to this site using intermediate ad pages that look like they could originate at this site. The owner reserves the right to configure the server in a way to refuse links from such offending referrers.
Privacy Policy
Data collection
It is possible for any user to browse this entire site without giving away any personal information.
Interactive features like the feedback form, guestbook, commenting form, submission forms or link list may prompt a user to enter personal information such as name or e-mail address. This data will be stored and processed automatically or manually by the owner, according to the dedicated purpose of the form that was filled out.
Please contact the site owner if you want to know which personal data is stored, or if you want to have your data removed.
Disclosure of information
Any information submitted with the explicit request of being confidential will be treated as such. Likewise, any information of personal nature included in a visitor's communication with the owner will not be disclosed to anyone else without the visitor's explicit consent. Unless the visitor indicates otherwise, any information of non-personal nature and falling into the scope of this site may be published and will be credited with the contributor's name.
Please indicate if you do not want to have your e-mail address posted (spam protection). I will include a hyperlink to your website only if I expect it to be permanent (i.e. not to sites under construction).
No e-mail addresses are collected by the owner other than from the personal mailbox and for personal use. The owner will not create unsolicited mass e-mails or automatic e-mails to visitors, unless these have explicitly been agreed on (newsletter). Other than crediting visitor submissions, e-mail addresses will never be given away to third parties. Exceptions may only apply in case of legal issues such as copyright disputes.
Third-party plug-ins
The Disqus comments are an interactive feature not under the control of the owner. Please refer to the posting rules and to the terms of service of Disqus. Disqus scripts are off by default and are only activated if requested by the user.
This site may include other social plug-ins besides Disqus, which too become active only on explicit request by the user.
YouTube videos are embedded on a couple of pages of this website. YouTube may collect data about your visit to this site.
Usage statistics
This website compiles usage data for statistical purposes. This usage data is not shared with any third party.
Cookies
This website does not store information about your visit to EAS on your computer. Embedded third-party services such as YouTube may use cookies.
Netiquette
The following notes are not legally relevant. However, they could be a useful reference for guestbook entries and e-mails. I always try to heed these principles myself.
1. Just call me "Bernd". It doesn't have to be "Herr Schneider" or "Dr. Schneider".
2. You can write me in English or in German.
3. Please choose a meaningful subject phrase when you write an e-mail, not something indefinite like "Hello", "Request" or "Something I noticed".
4. If you have a general question, you are most likely not the first one. Please read the comprehensive FAQ before you contact me.
5. Please don't pester me! I'm neither an encyclopedia nor a design service. I will answer as many questions as I can, but in many cases I will consult Memory Alpha or Google anyway, so you should consider doing that yourself. I will give you advice or feedback on your own efforts, but there is no way I would spend hours to research, write, scan or design something for you.
6. EAS is a completely free private website that I maintain in my spare time and entirely fund out of my own pocket. Although suggestions from other fans have contributed greatly to this site, I feel no obligation to fulfill all kinds of visitor requests. I may be unable to take your suggestions into account because there are more pressing tasks, because it is an unrealistic amount of work, because it doesn't fit into the scope of this site or because I simply can't find the format for it. Furthermore, it can't be my goal to post every available image or to create complete lists of each and everything ever mentioned. Sorry, but I have to narrow down points of interest for this website.
See Also
