Limits of liability

Below is how far Picdar's reporting may be trusted, how the archive of the original Picdar company ought to be read, and the point at which the publisher stops answering for things. The notice covers all of picdar.co.uk — fresh reporting and archive pages equally — and anyone reading the site does so on these terms.

What kind of publication this is

Picdar is a trade publication about the working end of media production: the picture desk, the asset library, the metadata that lets anyone find a frame again, the licences attached to photographs and the archives that outlive the systems built to hold them. It explains how those things work and reports on how they change. It does not sell software, does not run an image library, does not license pictures and does not act for anybody in a rights negotiation.

Everything on the site is offered to readers as information. Nothing here creates a relationship of adviser and client, and reading a page, quoting it or writing to the desk does not change that.

Not legal advice

A large share of the new material deals with copyright, moral rights, model and property releases, orphan works, licence terms and the data protection rules that touch photographs of people. These subjects are governed by statute and case law that differ between jurisdictions and change over time, and the answer in any real dispute turns on documents and facts the desk has never seen.

Articles describe how a rule is generally applied and where the usual traps lie. They cannot tell you whether your use of a particular picture is lawful, whether a given licence covers a given edition, or what a court would make of an unsigned release. When money, reputation or liability depends on the answer, take advice from a solicitor or a rights specialist who can read the paperwork.

The archive is a record, not an offer

This domain keeps 58 pages of the website that Picdar, the St Albans software company, published between 2003 and 2006. They are reproduced as published and marked as archive material wherever they appear. Statements inside them about products, prices, specifications, customers, support terms, vacancies, office addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses described the company's own position in the year the page was written.

The company described in those pages no longer trades. The present publisher has no connection with it, with its former owners or staff, or with any business that may have acquired its products, and cannot answer for them. No product named in the archive can be bought, licensed or supported through this site, no vacancy in it is open, and letters, calls or emails sent to the contact details printed in it will not reach anyone here. Some of those numbers and addresses may now belong to someone else entirely.

Accuracy, dates and corrections

New articles are checked against the published standard, statute or primary document they rely on, and the date shown on a page is the date that checking was last done. Standards bodies revise metadata schemas, vendors rename fields and retire products, and legislation is amended. A page that was right when it was dated may be out of step today, and no page is warranted to be exhaustive, up to date or without mistakes.

If you find a mistake in new material, the remedy offered is a correction: write to the desk with the address of the page, the passage concerned and, if you can, the source that shows the right version. The page is amended and the change noted. A factual dispute about an archive page is answered with an added note, because the archive text itself is not changed.

Vendors, products and case studies

Articles name software vendors, picture agencies, standards bodies, publishers and archives because the subject cannot be covered without them. A mention is not an endorsement, a ranking or a recommendation to buy. Descriptions of how a system behaves are based on its published documentation or on what was observed at the time of writing, and a newer release may behave differently.

Case studies in the archive were written by the original company about its own customers. They are kept because they record how British newspapers, broadcasters and charities handled pictures at the time, not because the claims in them have been verified by the desk.

Pictures, credits and rights holders

Photographs, screenshots and scans carry the credit given with them where one exists. Rights in archive material remain with whoever held them, and trade marks, including product names and logos, remain their proprietors' property; they appear here to identify what is being discussed. If you hold rights in something reproduced on the site and want it credited differently, replaced or removed, write to the desk with enough detail to identify the item and your claim to it. Requests are dealt with promptly, and an item whose ownership is in genuine doubt is taken down while the question is settled.

Advertising placements and outside links

Some pages carry advertising placements that have been paid for. They sit outside the editorial text, are not reviewed by the desk as recommendations and say nothing about the editorial view of whatever they point to. How the site is owned and paid for is set out in the ownership and funding section of the editorial page.

Links to other websites, whether in an article, in the archive or in a placement, take you to pages the desk does not control. Their wording, their uptime and their handling of visitors' data are a matter for their operators, and a link that worked when it was added may later lead somewhere else.

Documents and files

A few archive pages link to brochures and data sheets in the formats the company used at the time. They are kept for the record. Open them with ordinary care: files of that age may not display correctly in current software, and some links in the original pages never pointed to a file that existed.

Limits of liability

Readers take Picdar in whatever state it happens to be in on the day. Within what the law allows, no compensation is paid by the publisher to anyone whose loss stems from acting on a page, by trusting an archive statement, by following a link or a placement, or because the site was down when they needed it. That exclusion stops where the law of England and Wales, or of the country you live in, says it must stop: negligence that hurts someone, fraud, and any other liability that statute keeps in place are not touched by it.

Changes to this notice

Wording here is revised whenever the site, the way it is funded or the governing law moves on, and only the current text has effect. Reuse of material is dealt with in the terms of use; personal data has its own privacy page.

Who to write to

Picdar is owned and published by Sundrift Media Group N.V.. Corrections, rights questions and anything about this notice go to the editorial desk in writing, at the address below. Readers are not served by phone, and the registered office does not deal with reader post.

Sundrift Media Group N.V.
Kaya Flamboyan 9
Willemstad, Curaçao
Email: [email protected]