This content is not "freeware". The original, editorial and news writing in this home page is (except as attributed to others) the copyrighted property of its authors, contributors and/or the La Parola newsletter. You may download as source or text for offline personal or family reading. You may quote brief excerpts in publications of your own without permission, so long as proper attribution (credit) is given and the material is not used out of context.

The purpose of copyright restrictions is not to restrict your viewing enjoyment, but to allow authors to control distribution and reproduction of their own work. This mechanism makes it possible for you to find private material such as this available for browsing. Authors everywhere dread the prospect of finding their work copied or plagiarized by another, without permission or without credits, in some other book, magazine, web page, CD-ROM or other distribution channel. You would not want to be the person exposed as being a pirate, rip-off artist or cheat.

Just relax and enjoy the content.

You may excerpt (but not reproduce in full) fiction and nonfiction clips without permission, but only for your own personal use. This material may not be reproduced, uploaded, or published in text or electronic form without permission. ©1990-2002.

Our basic policy regarding publishing or republishing the material of others is that we respect copyrights, and will not knowingly take for our own use the intellectual property of others.

Some of the material on this site is the work of others. Where cited, excerpts are quoted and/or italicized, and source and authorship credit is prominently supplied. Whenever appropriate, we will supply a URL link to the site where the source material may be found and authenticated.

At our discretion, we also solicit and publish original articles, essays, poems and stories of others. All such material is printed with permission of the author, and the author copyright data and credits are prominently and unambiguously displayed.

Some material, notably found in Jokes and Humor, can rarely be attributed due to the nature of the material and the unfortunate anonymity of popular Internet distribution.

We're aware that all written material was, at one time, originally penned by some person. Whether because they did not care to protect it, or because other individuals removed the identifying credits, very little of the humor circulating the Internet bears proper source credits.

This reflects a trend toward considering web material "common to all" in the Elizabethan sense: "the use of land and air is common to all; neither can a title to it ..." But prevailing attitudes don't mean the material is public domain just because we received it without credits.

Unless we have strong reason to suspect otherwise, we may consider unsolicited material to be public domain, anonymous, or "freeware". In the case of jokes, it is not possible to track down sources, and we may print anonymous, unattributed or public domain humor at our discretion if it appears worth distributing.

In effect, jokes and humor are generally treated as quotations, whether or not the source can be identified, unless we are aware they are copyrighted (in which case short citations with proper credit are legal), or unless it is brought to our attention that further investigation is needed.

This is a non-profit site, and no material of others posted on this is for sale, or paid for through advertising or other revenues. 

If you believe you have identified material on this site that has not been printed with proper permission, or that should (but does not) credit a verifiable source, please  bring it to our attention.

Most of the high-quality digital images on this site are protected by DigiMarc watermarks.

You should not be able to see them when displayed on any monitor at any resolution, but the images can be decoded and traced back to this site. As with copyrighted text, you are generally free to download them for your viewing enjoyment.

(In PHOTOS, you are encouraged to do so, and high-quality copyrighted desktop pictures are available for you.) Digital image content on this site is protected by the same provisions as text content. Please respect authors' rights, so that we can continue to make this work available for everyone.

Our basic policy regarding publishing or republishing bona-fide letters and unsolicited material is that we require the writer's consent and go-ahead, when the writer is clearly communicating as a private individual.

Private communications of a personal nature, unless abusive, defamatory, or an egregious violation of ethics and/or the law, are normally considered privileged and confidential. We respect the private writer's privacy and need to know that a communication will remain privileged and confidential until such time as a mutual agreement might be reached about its publication.

We reserve the right to publish short excerpts of reader mail where the material is in our opinion informational, "non-personal", non-sensitive and of public interest: for example, how to format your hard drive. In such cases we will give proper credits attribution with initials where available. We may also post such material to the YaBB bulletin board forum with the same restrictions. If you are submitting "non-personal" material in this category but still do not want it posted or published, please let us know and we'll honor your request.

However, with the exception of flagrantly abusive email (see below), we do not publish full names or email addresses unless we have a written request asking us to include this information.

In the case of communications where the writer has contacted us as a representative of a company, corporation, firm, government body or agency or other institution, we reserve the right to decide whether and how the contents might be of interest to Summitlake.com readers.

Personal correspondence mailed from a place of work is presumed to be privileged and confidential information, especially if you have already established a history of personal correspondence with us. Corporate communications from an entity with whom we already do business, unless abusive, defamatory, or an egregious violation of ethics and/or the law, is also normally considered privileged and confidential.

If you are writing for the first time from a corporate address, on an issue that could be considered sensitive or personal, please state your intention or send us an inquiry when publication could be a compromising issue for you or your firm.

"Crank Mail" : from time to time, Summitlake.com does post unsolicited crank mail, flames, and similarly offensive "gift" email. Explicitly irrational correspondence that is also abusive or defamatory is an excellent candidate for this treatment. This material is treated like any other "letter to the editor" at newspapers and magazines. Even if we find the material objectionable, if we find it newsworthy, we reserve the right to publish it without notice.

What you should know when submitting original work to Summitlake.com:

Our basic policy regarding publishing or republishing original manuscripts and materials that are submitted to us for consideration for publication is that we reserve the right to make all decisions concerning suitability for publication on this site, and we require the writer's consent and go-ahead before actual publication.

This policy is no different than for other intellectual property. Since we do not pay for content, we anticipate no need for a separate policy on commercial content, which is already "the material of others".

Readers may feel free to submit content for consideration provided it is in good taste and not abusive, defamatory, or an egregious violation of ethics and/or the law. We consider bona-fide submissions to be the property of the creator, whether or not we accept for publication.

We reserve the right to evaluate the suitability of content, theme, style, and composition. We do not guarantee that we will offer any editing services or specific suggestions for publication. Generally, we will make suitability and acceptance decisions before replying to your submission. This can be negotiated by us, depending on the originality and merit of the work, and its suitability for our readership, in our opinion. Often as not in the past, the request for publication of works of others at Summitlake.com has been initiated by us.

Styling, fonts, graphics and markup: unlike many websites, we have few preconceived expectations about what good composition should look like. We can handle text in plain ASCII, e-mail, and Microsoft Word compatible formats, including Rich Text Format (rtf), on Mac or PC platforms. We can handle proprietary Apple formats that are bundled with current generation iMacs. We can handle almost any graphics format but reserve the right to crop, adjust, resize, reformat or reduce images, and or to alter their placement.

However, if you have spent a lot of time on styling, fonting and page layout: the only criteria we will generally use in deciding whether or not to convert it back to simple ASCII and simple styling is whether or not we agree that its overall effect is an asset. This is in some cases negotiable, but in most cases we will reformat for consistency with our own site's style.

HTML and XML markup: Unless we can run your page with little or no modification, we prefer text submissions. If we do offer a "go" decision, we will offer a marked-up prototype of your page for your review. Unless you are webmaster of a site to which you can point us for a working demo of your content, text is preferred. We edit in Dreamweaver and HomeSite. Microsoft proprietary tags and FrontPage supporting files are removed. XML is converted to plain HTML unless there is really good reason not to. Please do not send MS Word exports to HTML. Please do not send GoLive. We will not support Flash, Real, remote include statements, heavy Java, or server side includes that we do not provide ourselves.

If we are intererested in a submission, it will probably be because of factual and conceptual content. In actual practice, submissions accepted for publication at this site have been hassle-free for both parties. If you are interested in a submission, thanks for allowing us the opportunity to look at it.