Welcome to shzgh.org

Copyright Infringement Play It Safe: Making Sure You're Not Committing Copyright Infringement Copyright infringement is not an easy thing to explain. While it may seem as simple as not using someone else’s work, it’s not that easy. Thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many other organizations, we have the ability to use others’ works – as long as we use it under ‘fair use’ laws. So what does fair use have to do with copyright infringement, and how can you utilize it? Fair use laws are the conditions in which you can use a copyrighted work without having to pay someone royalties. This includes when you use a copyrighted work for educational or instructional uses, criticism of the work, commentaries on the work, news reporting about the work, teaching on the work (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship uses, and research. This is talked about fully in Section 107 of the Copyright Code (commonly called Fair Use) and is available for you to read at your local library. Copyright Infringement in day-to-day life Sometimes, if you’re writing a paper for work or school, or if you are creating a Power Point presentation, you need to use someone’s work that is already in copyright. So how do you use it without committing copyright infringement? All you have to do is ask – the worst they can say is no, right? But, if they do say no, there are several items in the public domain which may help you to finish your project without having to commit copyright infringement. What is the public domain, and how does it relate to copyright infringement? Material that is not copyrighted is considered in the public domain – you cannot commit copyright infringement on works in the public domain. These works include things that the copyright has expired on, or is not copyright-able – such as government publications, jokes, titles, and ideas. Some creators (writers, musicians, artists, and more) deliberately put their work in the public domain, without ever obtaining copyright, by providing an affiliation with Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows people who create materials to forfeit some, or all, of their copyright rights and place their work either partially or fully in the public domain. So, how do I ensure I’m not committing copyright infringement? First of all, if you’re going to use someone else’s material, you may want to check the public domain to see if something is suitable for use, instead of trying to use someone else’s copyright. However, if you can’t find something suitable (and you can’t create something yourself), the next best thing (and your only legal course of action) is to find a piece that is in copyright, and contacting the copyright holder. When you contact the copyright holder, make sure you tell them what you want to use their piece for – whether it’s for your blog, podcast, or report – and ask them if you can use it. You may have to pay royalties, or an attribution in your piece, or a combination of both. The creator may also place many limitations on when and how you can use their material. Follow all these instructions they give you, and you’ll be free and clear to use their work as you want. Once you have permission to use a copyrighted work, you need to make sure you stay within the agreed-upon boundaries - if you veer outside their agreed terms, you may open yourself up for a copyright infringement lawsuit – which can be nasty, costly, and time consuming. If you’re in doubt, before contacting the copyright holder, contact a copyright lawyer to ensure you’re following the law – and protect yourself!

Why Taking that Vacation Can Lead to a Better Workplace Do you love your vacations? Are they relaxing, fun and entertaining? There are many reasons why a vacation can enrich your life and fulfill you with joy and happiness. But many of these reasons actually can also be directly translated into reasons for why taking that vacation can lead to a better workplace for you, your boss and other employees. Vacations are as essential to a hard working employee as a parachute to a person jumping from an airplane with the goal to land safely. Many employers would love to minimize the time you are gone from your workplace because they think the more time you spend there, the more work you will accomplish. This argument is right up to a certain amount of hours and days a months or a year, but whenever your body starts to get tired and exhausted, the amount of work that you produce decreases. The quality of your work starts to decline as well. Time off work, time together with your family, time to relax, time to regenerate and time to just plain have fun are very important in an employees life. Taking a vacation has many benefits to the employee, but also to the company you work for. The more relaxed and happy your worker starts a workday or the workweek; the better will most likely be his or her performances at work. Research has shown that relaxation and regeneration are essential to human bodies. Did you know that in some companies in Europe and Asia, the emphasis on relaxation goes so far that meditation, morning sport and a short power nap belong to their required parts of a work day? The United States is actually one of the only industrialized countries that does not mandate a minimum of vacation days that the worker has to take off. In fact, in many countries in Europe, a minimum of 20 and more days is the norm. Since the late 1970s, the average middle income family works in total hours three and more months a year more then they did back then and according to a research done by Boston College, approximately 25% of Americans do not take a vacation at all. After all these facts are slowly emerging from mounts of collected date, some of the bigger American companies have actually begun to realize that off-time and vacation are essential to prevent mishaps and screwed up designs and products. If you are not taking your vacation or your employers does not allow for any vacation, a series of health hazards such as stress and high stress, sleeplessness, burnout, heart attacks and even more serious health conditions can occur. Another big factor in working too much, working overtime or never having vacation can be problems and loss of family and friends. Problems with families and friends will directly impact performance at work and even though the employee might not talk about it at work or might b e holding back his or her feelings, the mood and general behavior of the employee will have an impact ion his work and other employees. Every employee should value the vacation time given to him or her and employers should grant the time asked for to their employees. Vacation is essential to the performance at work and the quality in products the company can deliver. Following the examples that are set by many European countries, the US should give their employees the time they need and also make sure that their employees do take the time off to be a better employee overall. Vacation is fun, relaxing and regenerating.

Get Roboform to Help with those Countless Online Forms for Free Stuff RoboForm, is a web site that offers users programs to make life on the Pc and on the Internet easier. These programs help the user to remember and securely store online and offline passwords. How often does it happen that someone forgets the PC password and then there is no other way than reinstalling the whole PC operating system? The programs offered by the website also help with many other Internet and PC issues and tasks. RoboForm can log the user automatically into online accounts, complete online registrations and complete checkout forms with just one click of the mouse. This makes the program a great help with the countless online forms that exist for free stuff. Over and over fill freebie seekers online forms. Name, address, e-mail, birth date and more and this program is able to fill the information into the online forms with essentially one mouse click. For example, for online sweepstakes entries, the most important factor to receiving free stuff is how often one is able to sign up for different sweepstakes. Hunting down online free stuff is already time consuming, but filling out all the long and tedious entry forms every single time takes even longer. The company states, that this program can help the consumer increase the number of filled forms for sweepstakes at least ten times, since the users identity is stored in the software and then used to fill the online forms. When sweepstakes allow for multiple entries, the program can speed up this process even more. The software offers the option to save the data into a file and then the user needs to just choose the data and hit the fill and submit button and the sweepstake entry is on its way. For consumers of the software it is important to know, that RoboForm will not disqualify consumers from the sweepstakes and as the company states is completely legal. The reason a user cannot be disqualified for using this program is that the company that offers the sweepstake will not even remotely know that a program was used. Data is saved on the user’s computer and just used to fill the forms. The filling happens just like when the consumer enters the information himself into the form. Even if programs state that automated entries are prohibited, this excludes this program. The automated entries are referring to programs that submit the data to the page without the user ever viewing the page. With this program the user is still required to open the page, view it, and then fill the forms. The only part done by the program is filling the form. The user then still has to check the filled form and hit the submit button on the page by himself. This is what makes the whole process legal and a good deal for freebie seekers. By many this software is called the best way to automat sweepstakes and increases the free stuff coming into the house. Due to the programs ability to save online addresses users can browse thru their sweepstake web pages without having to remember all the long URL addresses. Additionally due to the ability to save already filled forms, users can easily participate in daily sweepstakes for certain products. When combining this software with one of the online pages that offer links to free contests, free products and more, consumers can be showered in anything from free movie tickets, to food products and health products. Many consumers have positive feedbacks to offer about the amount of freebies they are able to get every month. Sometimes people apply for freebies, even if they do not really need them. There are always pages up there, where the product can be donated or sold to other people.