General Terms of Use for Coolmath's Free Content:

By accessing or using the site, you agree to be bound by this agreement.

Coolmath.com LLC makes no promises that our visitors' grades will improve by the use of any of our family of sites.

Coolmath.com LLC does not guarantee the accuracy of any information included in any of our family of sites, nor do we guarantee the accuracy of the information included in any of the sites we link to.

The information including in our family of sites is meant to supplement standard academic courses and classroom instruction.

We are not responsible for any of the content included in any of our licensed content that is authored by people not employed by Coolmath.com LLC, such are our games at Coolmath-Games.com and at Coolmath4Kids.com.

Coolmath is not responsible for any ads that may appear on our sites via error or malware virusses. 

All materials on this site, as well as the organization and layout of the site, (except for our licensed content such as the games at Coolmath-Games.com and Coolmath4Kids.com) are owned and copyrighted by Coolmath.com LLC and may be accessed or printed for your personal non-commercial use only. Without the prior written permission of Coolmath.com LLC, you may not copy, distribute or transfer any material on this site, in whole or in part.

Note: This document is subject to change at any time. When it does, the changes will be posted on this page. Your continued use of the Coolmath family of sites, indicates that you accept the terms spelled out in this document.

About Copyrights and Fair Use

I'm sure you're all aware of copyrights and their importance in protecting the work of the creators of unique and innovative educational materials such as Coolmath.com and Coolmath Algebra.

Fortunately, for teachers and students there is something called "fair use."  Simply put, fair use is the exception that allows teachers and students to use (within some very restrictive guidelines) copyrighted materials for educational purposes in the classroom.  I've found that many teachers are unaware of the specifics regarding fair use of copyrighted materials like web sites.  ( I, too, was quite uninformed in this area until I started to do some investigating! )

For students, fair use is easy!  Students can use graphics and content all they wish (without permission) as long as it is for a class assignment.  The only restrictions are that the "borrowed" content cannot be displayed in a public forum such as a web site (e-portfolios come to mind here) without the permission of the copyright holder and the content cannot be put into a situation where it can be distributed or copied.  (Students cannot give the content to someone else for use.)

For teachers, it's a bit more complicated and MUCH more restricted.  To cut to the chase, the key is to never use anything that would cause the copyright owner to lose income.  For example, photocopying any portion of a textbook (or other book) for classroom use instead of buying copies of the book for each student.  Or downloading or printing a portion of a website for classroom use instead of visiting the site “live” so that the publisher can receive the income from the online ads.

Please understand that we can only afford to continue to maintain our websites and create new and innovation learning materials if we can be reimbursed for our time and expense.  The only ways we can be reimbursed are through the ads on our sites and the purchase of our books.  Your assistance in this area is greatly appreciated! 

How can you help support Coolmath?  Please ask your school and your district to create links on their official websites to Coolmath.com (or any of our other sites).  These links help our rankings with search engines such as Google.  Higher rankings help new people find us…  And helping as many people as possible is our goal!

For more information about copyrights and fair use, a good resource is from the Stanford University Library:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/index.html

Thanks for your interest in Coolmath…  And thanks again for reading this.  We really appreciate teachers like you!