Effective: November 8, 2024

Last updated: November 5, 2024

To review the previous policy, please click HERE.

This privacy policy (the “Privacy Policy”) describes the manner in which The Copyright Society (“The Society”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) collects, uses, and discloses your personal information in connection with your access to and use of our website (the “Site”, available at: www.copyrightsociety.org); social media accounts; communications (e.g., emails, postal mailings, phone calls, and/or texts); and our events (including online and in-person), (each of the foregoing, collectively, the “Service”). The Service is owned and operated by The Society. The purpose of this Privacy Policy is to explain our practices regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information in connection with your access to and use of the Service.

When you use the Service, you consent to our collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy. From time to time, we may change this Privacy Policy, in which case the “Last Updated” line above will be revised. You are responsible for regularly reviewing this Privacy Policy and your continued use of the Services following the posting of a changed Privacy Policy indicates your acceptance of the changes. Unless we provide you with specific notice, no changes to our Privacy Policy will apply retroactively.

You can withdraw your consent to our collection, use, or disclosure of your personal information at any time by contacting us using the contact information that is included in Section 10 of this Privacy Policy.

1. INFORMATION WE COLLECT

a. Information You Submit

We collect personal information that you provide to us directly. Personal information we collect directly from you may include without limitation your name, mailing address, billing address, username, email address, and/or phone number. If you submit the personal information of another person, you confirm that you have obtained permission from that person to provide us with that person’s personal information. 

b. Information Collected Through Tracking Technologies

In addition to any personal information or other information that we collect from you via the Service, we may use a variety of tracking technologies on the Site, such as cookies, that collect certain information whenever you visit or interact automatically or passively with the Site. These tracking technologies may collect information such as your IP address, browser type and version, type of device you use, operating system version, device identifier, and pages you view.

You can set your browser not to accept cookies or to notify you when you are sent a cookie, giving you the opportunity to decide whether or not to accept it. You may also use commonly available tools in your browser to remove cookies which may have been placed on your computer. However, please note that if you disable the use of cookies on your computer, some functionality of the Site may no longer work as a result of such disablement.

Your web browser may have settings that allow you to transmit a “Do Not Track” signal when you visit various websites or use online services. Like many websites and online services, the Site is not designed to respond to “Do Not Track” signals received from browsers. To learn more about “Do Not Track” signals, you may wish to visit http://www.allaboutdnt.com.

Additionally, we may from time to time use certain third-party web analytics services to help us understand and analyze how visitors use the Site and to serve ads on our behalf across the Internet, with such information being collected and stored on an aggregated and anonymized basis.

2. HOW WE USE THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT

We may use personal information to:

• establish, maintain, and manage our relationship with you;
• comply with your requests and preferences regarding your use of Service;
• provide requested communications and services to you, including processing transactions using third party processor(s);
• provide you with useful content;
• ensure the proper functioning of our Service;
• offer, operate, evaluate, and improve our Service;
• diagnose problems with our servers or our Site and provide data security;
• communicate with you;
• offer you a personalized experience or otherwise tailor our services to you (for example, via allowing you to set up an account and profile on the Site, as well as in order to provide you with specific resources applicable to your industry in your location/chapter of interest);
• investigate claims and/or legal actions, violations of our policies and procedures, and compliance with relevant applicable laws and legal process;
• comply with applicable laws, regulations, or legal process as well as industry standards and our policies;
• prevent, investigate, identify, or take any other action with regard to suspected or actual fraudulent or illegal activity, or any activity that violates our policies; and/or
• any other reasonable purpose to which we may notify you of in this Privacy Policy, or to which you consent.

By consenting to our collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information you allow us to fulfill the purposes for which we collect and use your personal information.

3. DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION

We may disclose personal information to other entities affiliated with The Society, for example we provide the names of registered attendees for our tentpole events on the Site to other members considering attending such events and for networking purposes we may sometimes supply event attendees with the name and contact information of other attendees who provide such information in connection with registration for the event.

Additionally, we work with third parties which provide services to us that help us facilitate one or more aspects of our Services. For example, we may provide personal information to service providers that assist in web maintenance or interest-based advertising. These service providers may also send you communications on our behalf.

We will disclose and transfer your information to third parties in the event of a business transaction, such as if we sell, buy, transfer, merge, consolidate or reorganize any part(s) of our business, or merge with, acquire, or are acquired by, or form a joint venture or partnership with, any other business.

Some features of the Service are public or semi-public. If you choose to display your personal information using these features of the Service, other users or the public may view such information and we are unable to control the manner in which such users may collect, use, or disclose such information. You are responsible for all risks associated with your submission or sharing of any personal information on public or semi-public features of the Service.

If legally required to do so, or if we believe that such disclosure is reasonably necessary, we may disclose your personal information to courts of law, public authorities (including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements), and other relevant third parties.

We may also disclose personal information as permitted by law, including in connection with a violation of federal, state, provincial, local, or other applicable law and where we determine that disclosure of information is necessary to comply with the request of a law enforcement or regulatory agency or other legal process.

By providing your personal information to us or access or using the Service, you consent to our disclosure of your personal information to third parties (including our service providers) as described in this Privacy Policy, including those that may be located outside of your jurisdiction of residence.

4. EXTERNAL PARTIES; LINKED RESOURCES & PAYMENTS

The Site may contain links to, or features facilitated by, other websites or online services. Use of an external-party feature may allow us to collect (or the other party to share) information about you, including your personal information. We are not responsible for the privacy practices, advertising, products, or content of websites or online services that The Society does not control. These other online services may have their own privacy policies and The Society is not responsible or liable for these policies.

If you initiate a transaction through the Site, such as a purchase or payment of fees or dues, we may collect and store information about you, such as your name, phone number, address and email, as well as any other information you provide to us, in order to process your transaction, send communications about such transactions to you, and populate forms for future transactions. Notwithstanding the foregoing, The Society does not collect or store your credit card information as part of any transaction. No credit card information, other than the information listed in this paragraph, is neither collected nor stored by us. Purchases made through the Site which require you to input your credit card information are processed by Stripe, a third-party credit card payment service, for the purposes of processing credit card data. For further information about Stripe please read their Privacy Policy HERE.

5. PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM CHILDREN

No information should be submitted to or posted to the Service by users under 13 years of age without the consent of their parent or guardian. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Although use of the Service by children is unlikely, if you become aware that a child has provided us with personal information without parental consent, please contact us at the address provided in Section 10, below. If we become aware that we have obtained personal information from a child under age 13 we will delete such information in accordance with applicable law.

6. YOUR CHOICES; ACCESS TO PERSONAL INFORMATION

Your Choices

If you have a registered account with The Society and have subscribed to the mailing list but would like to update your contact information, please visit the “Edit Account” section and update your personal information details. If you wish to change the email address associated with your account, please email info@copyrightsociety.org and provide the current email address associated with your account and the new email address you wish to associate with the account. If you elected to receive marketing materials from us and prefer to no longer receive any marketing materials from us, you may always opt out of our marketing communications or change your preferences by following a link in the footer of all non-transactional email messages from us.

You may change or withdraw your consent to our collection, use, or disclosure of your personal information at any time, subject to legal or contractual obligations, by contacting us using the contact information set out in section 10 below. Please inform us of your withdrawal or variation of your consent in writing. If you withdraw or vary your consent, we may not be able to provide you with the Service or certain aspects thereof.

Access to Personal Information

You can ask to access the personal information that we have received from or possess about you. If you want to review, verify, update, delete or correct your personal information, please contact us using the contact information set out in section 10 below. We may request specific information from you to enable us to confirm your identity and right to access, as well as to search for and provide you with the personal information that we hold about you.

Your right to access the personal information that we hold about you is not absolute. There are situations where applicable law may allow or require us to refuse to provide some or all of the personal information that we hold about you. In addition, your personal information may have been destroyed, erased, or made anonymous in accordance with our record retention practices. In the event that we cannot provide you with access to your personal information, we will endeavor to inform you of the reasons why, subject to any legal or regulatory restrictions.

7. INFORMATION FOR USERS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES

If you are using the Service from outside the United States, please be aware that The Society is based in the United States and the information we collect through and in connection with the Service will be transferred to, processed, and stored on our servers in the United States. The data protection laws and regulations applicable to your personal data transferred to the United States may be different from the laws in your country of residence. As such, your personal information may potentially be accessible to law enforcement and national security authorities in the United States where local laws may provide for a different level of protection for your personal information.

8. SECURITY

We maintain appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to help protect personal information collected or received online through the Service. Although we use reasonable efforts to safeguard information, transmission via the Internet is not completely secure and we cannot guarantee the security of your information collected online through the Service. Please advise us immediately of any incident involving the loss of or unauthorized access to or disclosure of your personal information that may be relevant to your use of the Service.

9. RETENTION OF INFORMATION

We keep your personal information on hand for as long as is reasonably necessary for us to complete the purpose in which we collected it, or as may be required by law, whichever is longer.

10. CONTACT INFORMATION

If you have questions or concerns with respect to our Privacy Policy, please contact us at info@copyrightsociety.org, or write to us at the following address:

The Copyright Society
1 East 53rd Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10022