Desert Rat Copyright Statement

Desert Rat User's Fee: $5.00. You are welcome to browse the Desert Rat WWW area on a free trial basis, but if you derive any significant amusement or information from the Desert Rat, you are obligated, by your own conscience, to send $5.00 to the address below. (Make check payable to "Area 51 Research Center." We also accept U.S. cash or the equivalent in any foreign paper currency.) This fee entitles you to guilt-free reading of all issues of the Rat on the internet for one year, as well as the privileges listed below. If you wish, you may make your payment anonymously (five bucks in an envelope clears your conscience), but if possible we would also like at least some of following information about you (in order of importance):
Email Address Name Customer number, if you have one City, State, Zip, Country Street Address	Area 51 Research Center PO Box 448, Dept. DR Rachel, NV 89001 USA
If you include your email address with your payment, we will send you an acknowledgment by email. (If two weeks go by and you have not received a message from us, it may indicate an error in the email address, and you may want to contact us at Area51rc@aol.com.)

Frequency and Posting

The Rat is primarily a World Wide Web publication, with hard copy and email versions later derived from the web version as a courtesy to readers without Web access. Each issue is posted on the day of publication to the World Wide Web at http://www.cris.com/area51/desert_rat. A few days later, it is sent by email or hard copy to paying subscribers who have requested this service. Following initial publication on the web, the author may continue to make minor corrections, additions and changes to each issue, but most of these changes will take place prior to publication of the next issue.

Prior Permissions

Back issues of the Desert Rat will continue to be available on the Web site and by hard copy.

Privileges of Paying Subscribers

1. The right to read all issues of the Desert Rat guilt-free in any on-line form.

2. The right to download any Rat issue or supporting files to your local disk for personal use only.

3. The right to subscribe to one of our email distribution lists, either for the full email Rat or a notice which tells you when the latest Rat is available.

4. The right to be given a customer number. (Sent by email.)

5. The right to contact us without incurring our scorn because you haven't paid.

6. The comfortable feeling that you have paid your dues and are not a freeloader.

Subscriptions

We maintain two subscription lists. One for the full length text-only version of the Rat, usually shipped in 3 parts. The other is a brief notification that the latest Rat is now available on WWW. Be sure to specify full or notice in your subscription request.

Subscriptions are also available in hard copy by regular mail for $15 for the next 10 issues, postpaid to the US or Canada (or $25 overseas). The hard copy Rat is a compact printout of the web version, including pictures. New issues are published as a booklet--usually 8 pages--pre-punched for storage in a three-ring binder. The $15 subscription fee covers only the hard-copy version of the Rat. (If you plan to also read it on-line, you need to send an additional $5 for guiltware.) Send payment to the same address above as for guiltware, but be sure to say what your payment is for. To respond to charges that we are getting rich from the hard-copy Rat, here is our Statement of Profit for it.

Back Issues

Email Contact

All inquiries regarding subscriptions and guiltware should be directed to Area51rc@aol.com.

Specific Permissions and Restrictions

• You may not copy the Rat source files from our Web site to any other public internet site. Source files include the html for each issue and any original graphics or original supporting files attached to it. However, if you have paid your guiltware fee, you may copy these files to your local disk for personal use provided you do not further redistribute them.

• You need no permission from us to establish URL links in your own Web pages to any portion of the Rat. (We will even add html labels to specific areas of a Rat page upon request.) However, if you link directly to any graphic or supporting text file in a Rat directory, we ask that you indicate its source and provide a link to the full Rat issue in which it was used.

• Beginning with DR#32, new issues of the Rat will no longer be posted to newsgroups or the FTP site, and for other users to do so will be considered a violation of our copyright. You also may not legally forward the Rat by email to any other user unless that user has also paid his guiltware fee.

• You may not legally photocopy or otherwise reproduce any hard-copy version of the Rat without permission (except for one-year permissions previously granted for Rats before #32.) This will also be considered a violation of our copyright.

• You may freely post or redistribute the "notice" version of the Rat (the table-of-contents-only version that tells Web users that the Rat is available). The notice version will continue to be posted to newsgroups.

• Internet users will not be added to either of our email distribution list unless they have paid their $5 guiltware fee. This applies to both the full-text list and the notice version.

• The $5 guiltware fee covers unlimited guilt-free on-line reading of all issues of the Rat for one year from the date we receive your payment. We will gladly accept more than $5 if you choose to send it, but we cannot credit the additional amount to the next year.

• About one year after your guiltware payment was received, we will ask for a $5 renewal fee if you continue to read the Rat, and we may cut off any of the above privileges to you if you do not pay.