Association of Virtual Worlds

Terms of Use

This Association of Virtual Worlds website (http://www.associationofvirtualworlds.com), including, without limitation, all subdomains thereof, the NING Business & Social Network, and any 3D virtual environments of the Association of Virtual Worlds ("our site" or "this site") is owned and operated by Association of Virtual Worlds LLC. Please read these terms and conditions carefully before using our site.

By using this site, you are accepting these Terms & Conditions of Use ("Terms & Conditions"). If you do not agree to these Terms & Conditions, please do not use our site. The Association of Virtual Worlds reserves the right to modify or amend these Terms & Conditions from time to time without notice. If you continue to use our site after we post changes to these Terms & Conditions, it will mean that you accept those changes.
If you are under 18 years of age, do not use this site unless you are an emancipated minor or have legal parental or guardian consent to accept these Terms & Conditions and are fully able to abide by them. This Association of Virtual Worlds does not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13, please don't submit any personally identifiable information to the Association of Virtual Worlds on this site.

1. Use of Materials on this Site

The Association of Virtual Worlds maintains this site for your personal information, education, and communication. Please feel free to browse our site. Except for User Submissions (see below), all materials on our site, including but not limited to artwork, photographs, graphics, audio clips, video clips, text and trademarks (collectively, "Materials"), are the sole property of the Association of Virtual Worlds or its licensors. The exclusive rights to all Materials on this site are protected by U.S. and international laws of copyright, trademark and unfair competition.

It is in keeping with the Association of Virtual Worlds' mission to encourage public discourse concerning virtual worlds and web3D. Accordingly, unless particular Materials are specifically restricted as noted on the web page, it is the Association of Virtual Worlds' policy to allow limited reproduction and distribution of the Materials posted on our site as follows: You may copy, reproduce and distribute content from this site provided that: (1) the particular article or section is reproduced in its entirety in its original form; you may not edit or otherwise change the substance of the content, or change or delete any copyright, trademark and other proprietary notices; (2) all copies include a statement that the Material was reproduced from associationofvirtualworlds.com with permission of the Association of Virtual Worlds LLC; (3) all copies include the following notice "© 2008 Association of Virtual Worlds. All Rights Reserved."; and (4) the copies are distributed at no charge, or at most, at actual cost. Provided you comply with all of these conditions, the Association of Virtual Worlds grants you a non- exclusive, nontransferable license to use the Materials on our site.

Other than as specifically described above, you may not copy, reproduce, distribute, modify, display, prepare derivative works based on, republish, transmit, repost or otherwise use the Materials on our site, without prior written authorization from the Association of Virtual Worlds. To request such permission, send and email to info@associationofvirtualworlds.com.
Association of Virtual Worlds, its logo, and the name of its newsletter VWJournal, are registered or common law trademarks of the Association of Virtual Worlds. In no event may Association of Virtual Worlds trademarks be reproduced separately from the textual content associated with them on the site. Unauthorized use of any Association of Virtual Worlds trademark, service mark or logo may be a violation of federal and state law.
If you download software from this site in order to use the Materials as authorized above, the software, including any files, images, audio or video clips incorporated in or generated by the software, and data accompanying the software (collectively, "the software") is licensed to you by the Association of Virtual Worlds. The Association of Virtual Worlds does not transfer the title to you. You own the medium on which the software is recorded, but the Association of Virtual Worlds retains full title to the software, and all intellectual property rights therein. You may not redistribute, sell, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce the software to a human-perceivable form.

1. Your User Submissions to this Site

You may submit information, text, photographs, graphics, videos, or other material (collectively, "User Submissions") to this site.

Association of Virtual Worlds does not endorse any User Submission or any opinion, recommendation, or advice expressed therein, and the Association of Virtual Worlds expressly disclaims any and all liability in connection with User Submissions.
Users should be aware that your User Submissions are public, not private communications. When you voluntarily disclose personal information through your User Submissions, that information can be collected and used by others and may result in unsolicited messages from other people.

You agree that your User Submissions will comply with our Community Guidelines, below.
By submitting User Submissions to this site, you hereby grant Association of Virtual Worlds an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to reproduce, use, copy, sell, distribute, create derivative works from, publicly display, or publicly perform the User Submission (or any portion thereof) in perpetuity, and the Association of Virtual Worlds may sublicense all or part of its rights under this license or assign them to third parties.

By submitting User Submissions to this site, you represent and warrant that the User Submissions is your original work, that the User Submission does not violate any agreement between you and a third party, and that the User Submission shall not infringe upon or violate any law, agreement or other rights of any kind, of any third party, without limitation, rights affecting copyright, patent, trademark, unfair competition, contract, defamation, privacy or publicity. You agree that you will, at your own expense, defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Association of Virtual Worlds and its affiliated and related entities, licensees, successors and assigns, employees, officers and directors, representatives, contractors and agents from all claims, losses, damages and expenses of any kind (including, without limitation, attorneys' fees and disbursements) arising out of or in connection with a breach or alleged breach by you of your obligations or warranties herein.

The Association of Virtual Worlds may refuse or remove any User Submission that, in its sole judgment, violates these Terms & Conditions. Association of Virtual Worlds has the right, but not the obligation, to monitor this site for inappropriate content. You are solely responsible for any User Submission you post on this site.

1. Community Guidelines, Privacy, and Other Important Terms

We welcome and respect your opinions, even if we don't agree with them. We ask that you welcome and respect our opinions and those of other visitors to this site. Communicate with common courtesy and collegial respect; disagree without being disagreeable. We also welcome your creativity, but don't be vulgar. The DON'T'S below are intended to keep this site a safe, informative, and constructive community for all those who visit it. Please understand and comply with them in this spirit.

You agree not to submit, upload or post any User Submission to this site which (1) libels, defames, invades privacy, or is obscene, pornographic, abusive, harmful to minors, or threatening; (2) infringes any intellectual property or other right of any person or entity, including but not limited to, violating anyone's copyrights, patents, trade secrets, trademarks, trade names or other proprietary right of a third party, or would otherwise give rise to civil liability; (3) falsifies or deletes author attributions, legal notices or other proprietary designations; (4) violates any law or regulation; (5) constitutes or encourages conduct that could constitute a criminal offense, under any applicable law or regulation; (6) contains viruses, corrupted files, or other materials that may cause damage to another's computer, (7) advertises or otherwise solicits funds or sales of goods or services, or which disseminates any junk mail, spam, chain letters, schemes or other form of such solicitation, (8) is false, deceptive, or misleading; (9) impersonates any person or entity including, but not limited to, a Association of Virtual Worlds employee or leader, or falsely states or otherwise misrepresents your affiliation with a person or entity; or (10) violates an applicable U.S. or foreign law, treaty, regulation or convention related to privacy, publicity, data protection, electronic communications or anti-spamming.

When you visit our website, we may collect non-personal information about your visit. We may collect your IP address, browser type, domain name, and log the length of time of your visit and the number of times you visit and purchase from us. We assign you a unique internal identifier to help keep track of your future visits. We use this information to gather aggregate demographic information about our visitors, and we use it to personalize the information you see on our website and the emails you receive from us (should you grant us permission to send to you). We keep this information for our internal use; we do not share it with others. This information is in no way tied to your personal information, including your email address. This information is a corporate asset of The Wave Group, Inc. and may be sold or transferred to another entity as part of the assets should the company be sold or merged or acquired. 

Our website uses cookies to store information between users' visits to our site and for the duration of the visit, also known as a session. Cookies are a mechanism to remember information about a visitor when he or she navigates from one Web page to another. Our Website uses cookies to hold users' unique session identifiers, allowing our Web server to serve correct information back to the user. Such information includes the user's shopping cart items, or whether he or she is logged in when requesting to view or modify personal information, including your email address, which may have been stored in our database in the past. Our Website cookies do not hold any personal identifiable information. Disabling or rejecting cookies will prevent users from adding items to the cart and checking out; however, standard browsing on our Website does not require cookies.
Associationofvirtualworlds.com uses tracking technologies that collects anonymous information about your browsing habits. Links in our email communications to recipients are tracked once you land on our website. We collect information such as your operating system, browser, resolution, geographical location, products ordered, and order total. This information is used to help associationofvirtualworlds.com web and marketing teams understand the behavior of visitors to our website and understand the effectiveness of online and email messages. Your information is submitted anonymously, and no sensitive or personally identifiable information is transmitted.
Third-party relationships:

1. We may have an affiliate program that allows other websites to earn money by directing people (through links) to our website. If you sign up as an affiliate, your contact information (website address and related information, email address, mailing and payment addresses, and contact information) is sent to a third party who activates your affiliate status and pays you based on the sales you generate for associationofvirtualworlds.com. The third-party affiliate manager has its own privacy policy. Please be aware that when signing up as an affiliate you are entering information on a third party's website (not our website) even though our logo frames the Web page you are visiting.
2. We use third-party intermediaries. When you purchase from us, we send your credit card information, name, and billing address to credit card companies for verification and to authorize your purchase.
3. We may use outside shipping companies to fulfill orders. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information, including email address, for any other purposes.
4. We may provide certain third party offers for your consideration. Should you choose to place an order with one of these partners, in some cases we will share certain information, including email address, necessary to facilitate your transaction with them. We will always ask for your consent prior to sharing your information with anyone.
5. Associationofvirtualworlds.com may use a third party email service provider to send its advertising related emails. Associationofvirtualworlds.com may handle the sending of order related and member service related messages internally or may outsource this function. associationofvirtualworlds.com service providers do not retain nor use your personal information, including your email address for any other purpose except to provide the service on our behalf.

We occasionally run online surveys and we ask visitors for contact information (such as email address) and demographic information (such as zip code, age, or income level). We use contact data from our surveys to send users information about our company. You may opt-out of the survey and also opt-out of any future mailings at the time of the survey. The demographic information is used to learn more about the types of people who visit our site. This information is not shared with any other parties currently. We reserve the right to share this information with other parties in the future.

We reserve the right to transfer information to a third party in the event of a sale, merger or other transfer of all or substantially all of the assets of associationofvirtualworlds.com, which is owned by Association of Virtual Worlds LLC whose mailing address is 2201 Sawgrass Village Drive, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL 32082.

1. Notice of Claims for Copyright Infringement

To file a notice claiming that your copyrighted work has been infringed, you must send a written communication by email. Please note that you will be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that material or activity is infringing your copyrights.
Please provide us with the following information:

1. A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed;
2. A description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on our website, with enough detail that we may find it on the website;
3. Your address, telephone number, and email address;
4. Include the following statement: "I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law."
5. Include the following statement: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
6. The electronic signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner of the work that is allegedly infringed.

Send the written communication to the following address: info@associationofvirtualworlds.com.

1. Security

This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. However, your confidential use of this site cannot be guaranteed by the Association of Virtual Worlds. The Association of Virtual Worlds shall not be responsible for any harm that you or any person may suffer as the result of a breach of confidentiality with respect to information you transmitted to the site.

1. Account Registration and Security

You may need to create an account to access some features or areas of this site. When creating your account, you must provide accurate and complete information. You are solely responsible for any and all uses of your account, and you must keep your password secure. You may never use the account of another user. You must notify the Association of Virtual Worlds immediately if you suspect any unauthorized use of your account. Although Association of Virtual Worlds will not be liable for any unauthorized use of your account, you may be liable for the losses of Association of Virtual Worlds or others due to such unauthorized use.

1. Outside Links

The Association of Virtual Worlds has not reviewed all of the sites linked to this site and is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of any off-site pages or any other sites linked to this site, whether or not they are affiliated with the Association of Virtual Worlds. Such linked sites are for your convenience only and you access them at your own risk. The Association of Virtual Worlds makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or functioning of any such link. That another web site is linked to our site does not constitute endorsement by the Association of Virtual Worlds of the owner of the other site, the content of its site, or its products or services.

1. Warranty Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

YOUR USE AND BROWSING OF THIS SITE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. THE CONTENT COULD INCLUDE TECHNICAL INACCURACIES OR OTHER ERRORS. ALL CONTENT ON THIS SITE IS PROVIDED TO YOU "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS DOES NOT WARRANT THAT USE OF THIS SITE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT OUR SITE OR THE SERVER THAT MAKES IT AVAILABLE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING ALL NECESSARY PRECAUTIONS TO ENSURE THAT ANY CONTENT YOU MAY OBTAIN FROM THE WEBSITE IS FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL CODE. THE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS DOES NOT WARRANT OR MAKE ANY REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING THE CORRECTNESS, ACCURACY, OR RELIABILITY OF ANY CONTENT AVAILABLE THROUGH THIS SITE. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR VERIFYING ANY INFORMATION BEFORE RELYING ON IT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS, ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, OR AGENTS, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM ANY (I) ERRORS, MISTAKES, OR INACCURACIES OF CONTENT, (II) PERSONAL INJURY OR PROPERTY DAMAGE, OF ANY NATURE WHATSOEVER, RESULTING FROM YOUR ACCESS TO AND USE OF OUR SITE, (III) ANY UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR USE OF OUR SECURE SERVERS AND/OR ANY AND ALL PERSONAL INFORMATION AND/OR FINANCIAL INFORMATION STORED THEREIN, (IV) ANY INTERRUPTION OR CESSATION OF TRANSMISSION TO OR FROM OUR SITE, (IV) ANY BUGS, VIRUSES, TROJAN HORSES, OR THE LIKE, WHICH MAY BE TRANSMITTED TO OR THROUGH OUR WEBSITE BY ANY THIRD PARTY, AND/OR (V) ANY ERRORS OR OMISSIONS IN ANY CONTENT OR FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE OF ANY KIND INCURRED AS A RESULT OF YOUR USE OF ANY CONTENT POSTED, EMAILED, TRANSMITTED, OR OTHERWISE MADE AVAILABLE VIA THIS SITE, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT, OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, AND WHETHER OR NOT THE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS IS ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

SPECIFICALLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR USER SUBMISSIONS OR THE DEFAMATORY, OFFENSIVE, OR ILLEGAL CONDUCT OF ANY THIRD PARTY AND THAT THE RISK OF HARM OR DAMAGE FROM THE FOREGOING RESTS ENTIRELY WITH YOU. IN THE EVENT THAT YOU HAVE ANY DISPUTE WITH ONE OR MORE OTHER USERS OF THIS SITE, YOU RELEASE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS, ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES AND AGENTS, FROM AND AGAINST ANY AND ALL CLAIMS, DAMAGES, OBLIGATIONS, LOSSES, LIABILITIES, COSTS OR DEBT, AND EXPENSES (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ATTORNEY'S FEES), KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, SUSPECTED AND UNSUSPECTED, DISCLOSED AND UNDISCLOSED, ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH SUCH DISPUTES.
THE FOREGOING WARRANTY DISCLAINER AND LIMITATION OF LIABILITY SHALL APPLY TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW IN THE APPLICABLE JURISDICTION AND WILL SURVIVE THESE TERMS & CONDITIONS AND YOUR USE OF THIS SITE.

1. Indemnity

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless the Association of Virtual Worlds, its officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from: (i) your use of and access to this site; (ii) your violation of any term of these Terms & Conditions; (iii) your violation of any third party right, including without limitation any copyright, property, or privacy right; or (iv) any claim that one of your User Submissions caused damage to a third party. This defense and indemnification obligation will survive these Terms & Conditions and your use of this site.

1. General Provisions

This site is operated under the supervision of the Association of Virtual Worlds from its offices within the state of Florida. If you choose to access our site from other locations, you do so at your own initiative and you are responsible for complying with local laws, if and to the extent local laws are applicable. You may not download or otherwise export or re-export software from our site in violation of United States export controls.
You agree that this site shall be deemed solely based in Florida, and that this site shall be deemed a passive website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over the Association of Virtual Worlds, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than Florida. These Terms & Conditions shall be governed by and construed according to the laws of the state of Florida, as they are applied to agreements entered into and to be performed entirely within Florida. Any claim or cause of action arising out of or relating to this site shall be barred permanently unless such claim or cause of action is brought within one year after it arises; any such claim or cause of action shall be brought only in the state or federal courts in the Middle District of Florida, and you consent to jurisdiction of such courts for the purpose of litigating such actions.

Whenever possible, each provision of these terms shall be interpreted in such manner as to be effective and valid under applicable law, but if any provision is deemed prohibited or invalid under applicable law, such provision shall be ineffective to the extent of such prohibition or invalidity without invalidating the remainder of such provision or the remaining provisions of these terms.

This is the entire agreement between us relating to your use of this site. These terms may not be modified by you, in writing or otherwise, unless agreed to in a written document signed by the Association of Virtual Worlds.

These Terms & Conditions, and any rights and licenses granted hereunder, may not be assigned by you, but may be assigned by Association of Virtual Worlds without restriction.
The Association of Virtual Worlds has the right, in its sole judgment, to block access from a particular Internet address or to suspend or terminate a user's account for violations of these Terms & Conditions. In addition, Association of Virtual Worlds reserves the right to seek all remedies available at law and in equity for violations of these Terms & Conditions.