AmblesideOnline Content Redistribution, Reposting, and Marketing
We appreciate the desire of our users to contribute to the Charlotte Mason community. However, we hope you will understand that AmblesideOnline does not operate by the usual business model. Our work is available without cost, and accessible to everyone. For nearly two decades we have provided both free curriculum and free support for families that use the curriculum. We have encouraged AO families to give back, and scores of users have done this over the years with music, schedules, bookmarks, and files, all shared freely without cost to other AO families. This is the only model that we are interested in promoting in the AO community, and we cannot allow or endorse products using our name and material that will be sold, even if some AO families would be willing to pay.
The materials on the AO website are copyrighted in their content, format and compilation to the AmblesideOnline Educational Foundation, and legally can only be posted at the AmblesideOnline website or in a publication produced by the Advisory. While we are fully supportive of individual efforts to provide a service to homeschoolers, it remains that if the AO Advisory ever allows use of AmblesideOnline materials on other websites or products, we put AOEF at legal risk of forfeiting the right to protect our work -- and to protest effectively -- when others violate our License Agreement and our copyright. As such--
- No one may put AmblesideOnline in the name of their product or service.
- No one may use the AmblesideOnline name to advertise or promote their product or service.
- No one may copy and publish the curriculum (or parts of the curriculum) elsewhere.
- No one may use the AO Forum or AO Facebook group to advertise their product or service for sale.
We have consistently refused all requests to do these things, not because we bear ill-will to anyone, but because we chose to make AmblesideOnline free; no one else has a right to make a profit by using our name, and we do not want AO users to become a targeted market. Many interesting projects have been proposed to us, and our refusals are not a reflection of the worthiness of any project, but rather we have followed these policies for the sake of AO's integrity and the protection of our members.
Because we offer AmblesideOnline for free use, some have presumed to treat our curriculum as public domain. It is not. It is protected by copyright under the law, just the same as any other curriculum materials. In recent years, as AO has acquired thousands of users, we have encountered even more copyright infringement, and to our dismay, many of those infringing or would-be infringers have objected to our policies. That does not change the fact that AO is a copyrighted work and not free to re-post. We appreciate the enthusiasm of our users, but we ask that they police themselves, and consider carefully before reposting our content elsewhere.
User-Created Resources and Helps
The only authorized and current version of the AmblesideOnline curriculum is that which is posted on our website at amblesideonline.org. Various helps, schedules, print-outs, and booklets that users create and share freely on our support groups cannot be guaranteed to have any updates that the Advisory makes to the curriculum, and can never replace what is posted on our website.
If you are a creator of these helps, we ask that you provide them freely from our support group(s), and in such a way that users are directed to our website. User-created helps can be so comprehensive that other users sometimes rely on them rather than visiting the AO website, and then they miss important footnotes about books, explanations about how to use resources, and any updates made to the curriculum. As well, we have found that providing too much support and supplemental material prevents parents/teachers from grasping the understanding they need to implement this kind of education. In our experience, there is much to be gained from collecting the resources, reading the footnotes, pencilling together a schedule, working to wrap one's head around how this all works. Making it all too easy is sadly not always the best way to encourage others to grow and learn, and there are no shortcuts to the learning process.
How to Share Resources Without Violating AO's Copyright.
If you have schedules, charts, or other documents you have created that you think other AO members would benefit from, you may post them to the files on our Facebook group or Forum with this disclaimer added to the document you're posting:
"Formatted by [ your name ] using copyrighted material from AmblesideOnline.org. Posted with permission, for personal use only. Do NOT repost, republish, or sell in any form, electronic or otherwise. This should not be seen as official approval or endorsement. AO's booklists and curriculum are revised from time to time. Please be sure to check the AO website for the most up-to-date versions of our curriculum, booklists, and schedules."
From time to time we might peruse the files, and we reserve the right to remove any of them that we feel are not in keeping with CM's principles.