PLC Submission Policy

This policy was last updated August 22nd, 2006, and may be updated by Photo Lucidity staff at any time, with or without notice. ALL SUBMISSIONS TO PL ARE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS POLICY, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT READ WHAT THESE TERMS ARE. IT IS THEREFORE IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH THIS POLICY.

Unless otherwise noted, all first-person pronouns ("we", "us") used in this Policy refer to Photo Lucidity's staff members, and all second-person pronouns ("you") refer to the registered member of Photo Lucidity and/or the unregistered visitor to Photo Lucidity, though this Policy is written primarily with regards to registered members.

This Policy in a Nutshell:

• ALL submissions to your PL gallery must be YOUR own artistic work and may NOT violate copyrights held by ANY other artist or studio.
• WE reserve the right to monitor and/or review submissions (past and present) for compliance with this policy, and to reject or delete any violations.

1 - Ground Rules, Copyrights, and Enforcement

We at Photo Lucidity respect the copyrights of artists over their work, and we do not require nor claim any copyright over material submitted to your PL gallery -- we have no interest in doing so. However we must require a worldwide, non-exclusive right to use and display your submission (as described later in Section 4). That is to say, we must be allowed to exhibit your work in public across the Internet, but at the same time, even though you license these exhibition rights to us, you also retain those rights yourself and are free to grant similar permissions or licenses for other users or sites to exhibit the work as well.

Because of this, we must furthermore require that you are the copyright holder (i.e. creator) of the work you submit to PL. We cannot accept any submissions which are not your creation and copyright, or which otherwise violate the copyrights held by other artists over the work in question.

Having said that, we cannot allow any submissions of the following:

1. Copyrighted Work by Another Artist.
   Attempting to impersonate another artist, or to misrepresent their work as your own, is acknowledged as a form of theft and shall be prosecuted. To a lesser degree, even if you "disclaim" the submission as the creation of another artist, even if you identify and link to the original artist who created the piece, we still cannot accept the submission simply because are not the copyright holder (i.e. creator) of the work and therefore have no rights to re-use that piece for a submission here. Similarly, this clause also extends to the use, modification, direct copying (such as "tracing"), or inclusion of other artists' material in your submission (in the same ways as modification or use of copyrighted Official Art) -- we can allow only artwork created by YOU.

   Sole Exception: Artwork jointly created through a collaborative, "fair-use" agreement between two artists can be allowed; however, we reserve the right to remove a "collab" if we believe that no collaborative agreement actually took place and instead the result is in violation of the original artist's copyright.

2. Non-artistic photography (such as icons, buttons, or textures)
   Images uploaded for the purpose of being used or transferred to another website or domain, rather than as an artistic creation for exhibition in your gallery. Our site is not an image host and we furthermore do not allow images on our servers to be directly linked from outside domains.

3. Erotic/pornagraphic photography
   Art of a sexually explicit nature is not permitted here to comply with advertiser policies.

For the purposes of showing off art that voilates the above policies you can upload to a site like and show them off in the forums and on other sites.

Violations: Submissions which can be classified under any of the above categories constitute a violation of this Policy and will be removed by PL staff as they are discovered or reported, with or without warning. Additionally, any re-submissions of material previously deleted as a violation automatically constitutes a violation in and of itself and shall similarly be immediately removed.

Termination: In the event of repeated violations, we reserve the right to take further action beyond the removal of the actual violation, which can include the suspension or termination ("banning") of your PL submission privileges and/or PL account itself, as well as removal of all content you submitted to PL.

2 - Submission Quality Guidelines

All PL submissions must meet the following minimum standards. Submissions which do not meet these requirements may be removed by PL staff at any time.

1. Size: All images that are above 1500 pixels to the long side will be set for manual approval and will likely be rejected for resizing. See this announcement for explaination.
2. Orientation: All images must be rotated right-side up before submission. Images deemed to appear "sideways" or "upside-down" shall be subject to immediate removal without warning.
3. Cropping: Unused space should be removed from the top, bottom, or sides of an image before submission. This reduces the size of the image being submitted as well as improves the clarity of the thumbnail. Images need not be tightly cropped, but we reserve the right to reject or delete a submission if it is clear that no cropping has been performed.
4. File format: Artwork saved in BMP format, or in proprietary (program-specific) image formats (such as PSD, PSP, or XCF) should be converted or exported to a standard file format (such as JPG, GIF, or PNG) before submission; this will reduce the amount of bandwidth and processing incurred while submitting the work, especially for low bandwidth ("dial-up") users. Files uploaded in most other formats will be auto converted, however this does not give you as much control over the file so you are better off doing it yourself.

3 - Other Submission Guidelines

The following is a brief description of the submissions form and the guidelines for each field that appears on it. In order for your submission to be processed, you must fill out all the required fields:

• Title - Title of your piece. Your submission's Title must be humanly readable and may not be prefixed with punctuation or symbols. Additionally it must also be appropriate for all ages to view and may not include profanity or swear words.
• Description - Your own comments or discussion about the piece being submitted. Your submission's Description should remain on the general subject of the piece you are exhibiting.
• Keywords - A short list of words which describe the submission, for search engine purposes. Keywords must relate to the piece being submitted.
• Category - The PL gallery section in which your submission will appear. When selecting a category, please review its description carefully to ensure that it is appropriate for your submission. PL staff reserve the right to reject a submission if you do not choose an appropriate section for it, or to move it to a more appropriate section.
• File - The artwork being submitted, which must comply with the rules and guidelines listed previously in Sections 1 and 2.
• Media - The medium with which you created the work. Please select the most appropriate option for the medium you used.
• Content Advisories - Labels to identify any potentially offensive (or "Mature") content depicted in your submission. See our separate Ratings Policy for further requirements and details.

Additional, optional fields on the Submissions page are:

• Time Spent: An estimation of the time you spent creating the piece.
• References: Short summary of any reference material which assisted in the creation of your piece.
• Skill Level: This is currently being recorded for statistical purposes only. It has no other effect on your submission.

4 - Summary of Submission Agreement and User Obligations

Under penalty of administrative action by PL staff, by submitting content to Photo Lucidity, you hereby swear:

1. That, as previously explained in Section 1, you are the copyright holder to the work being submitted, and that your work does not violate any copyrights of other artists;
2. That you are licensing your work for:
   • Exhibition and display in your Photo Lucidity gallery, and other gallery sections throughout PL;
   • Exhibition and display for other purposes relating to Photo Lucidity, for example the promotion and advertisement of PL itself;
3. That your artwork satisfies our Quality Guidelines as previously described in section 2;
4. That your work satisfies the conditions of our separate Ratings Policy, i.e.:
   • That your submission does not depict any patently "adult" or sexually explicit content;
   • That you have applied accurate warning labels to your submission for other potentially offensive content.
   For further information, review the Ratings Policy page.
5. That you acknowledge the rights we must reserve of you and the submission (as described next).

5 - Summary of Rights Reserved by PL Staff

We reserve the rights:

1. To convert your submission to an appropriate file format for optimum storage on our servers, as well as for optimum transfer and display to other users viewing the work;
2. To resize (such as create "thumbnails" of) the image for transfer and display in your PL gallery and other categories;
3. To "watermark" said thumbnails, resized versions, or "downloads" of the artwork image for identification and association as a submission to PL, if or where deemed necessary (noting that any such watermarking does not constitute us claiming any copyright over the piece as a whole -- we have no reason nor interest to do that);
4. To modify any secondary fields of a Submission (i.e. all details not including the uploaded File itself) if deemed necessary to comply with policy and guidelines -- specifically:
• Modifying the Title, Description, or Keywords if they are deemed inappropriate;
• Modifying any Content Warnings to accurately reflect the content of the submission;
• Modifying the Category in which the submission shall appear.
5. To reject, remove, or delete any submission which violates the terms of Section 4 (or, by extension, Section 1), and if it cannot reasonably be brought into compliance via our rights described above. If and when such action is deemed necessary we will try to inform you about the nature of the violation, but this is a 'courtesy' notification only and we also reserve the right to remove a violation without informing or notifying you of the reason.

6 - NO WARRANTY.

Use of (and submission to) PL is provided on an "AS-IS" basis and we do NOT provide any warranties or guarantees of any kind whatsoever; in other words, you use this site at your own risk. We shall not be liable or responsible for any problems experienced or damage incurred through the use, browsing, and/or submission to PL. We acknowledge that PL may experience technical problems from time to time, and we welcome reports of them; but we cannot be responsible for loss of time or user submitted data due to any problems that may occur.

7 - Miscellaneous Clarifications

1. Collaborative Works, as explained in Section 1, can be deleted as a copyright violation if we cannot verify or and/or do not believe that any "fair-use" agreement between two artists was ever made. Therefore, if you are working on a collaborative piece, you must cite who else is assisting you in the work, so that it may be verified.
2. Minor violations of Sections 2 and 3 generally will not accumulate towards or result in a suspension or ban of your PL account; you will be asked to correct the error before trying again.

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