Due to the fact that absolutely no one has requested our formal position on the archive, I present you

HISTORY

To start with, thank you for your interest in the Def Con Memory Repository. It was determined that Dark Tangent couldn't keep up with all of the picture archives that kept popping up, and there was no central directory or collection of pictures specifically for Def Con that didn't have stale links or empty directories. Well, okay, we decided that for ourselves, and began years ago by mass-ripping other people's archives for our own pleasure.

Just before Def Con 9 we picked a silly domain name and propped up a web site where we initially linked, and then later actually starting copying, other people's archives. A few months later, with a big box, big drives, big pipe, and a whole lot of downloading it appeared the site was actually useful to some (determined by the number of unique visitors and links that kept popping up on mailing lists).

Thus began yet another project.

We intend for this archive to be completely agnostic when it comes to treatment and preference of any particular person or group of persons, no matter how annoying or k-rad they really are. Instead of opening up the ability to advertise links to other pages, we'll leave that to supporters and sites that we support as an organization. If we ever offer a bathroom wall or guest book, all will be invited to participate. If any unfairness or mistreatment is detected by our users, we expect you to bring it to our attention as it is our intention to provide this repository to the whole community, even knowing that we all don't get along or give a damn about each other.

History is both good and bad, and to have a complete archive of events that we all participated in, no prejudice or bias will be tolerated in the process or result.

README

While every intention to protect original copyrights will be taken, it is certainly possible that we may have included photographs or other electronic media without permission or right to distribute. Our position on this is that they were obtained via publically accessable methods and we consider them to have been entered into public domain and available for fair use, unless we hear otherwise.

Nearly all of the images on this site have been obtained by simply copying them from other web sites. If the original URL is known, it will be provided. To view the images in their original state, it is recommended that you visit the original URL. While we initially mirror the original archive exactly, there will be future attempts at unifying the interface between all archives for easier navigation. We have no intention in manipulating any archive images whatsoever with the exception of resizing for thumbnail or bandwidth purposes.

There are images in this repository that depict nudity, sex, drugs, debauchery, minors, animals, and other ugliness in various combinations. We certainly have no intention to spread images of anything that may be considered illegal, but we also do not claim to have viewed all (or any) of the images in a particular archive on in the repository as a whole. If images that are stricly illegal are found, they will be removed. If you simply have a moral issue with any of the images, you can clean your cache and go elsewhere.

We recognize the concept provided by the Berne Convention that states something to the effect that copyright doesn't have to be specifically claimed on a work, which means images found on this site with no text or graphics indicating the status of them doesn't mean they can be used for any purposes that the original author does not allow. While we have no more control over what our viewers do with these images than the original maintainer of the original site does, we will do our best to maintain the integrity of the original work and will make no monies from them or accept donations of any kind for a specific image or archive.

If you are the original photographer of any images in this repository, and you object to having them displayed on this site, please contact us. If it is determined that the image is freely available to anyone and everyone on the Internet, we may simply deny your request to have them removed. We may also be tired and hungover and remove them because we're tired of your whining. This is a non-profit web site run for the hell of it by people who really aren't all that motivated. No effort is requested or required by anyone who has or views content on this site, suggestions are appreciated, but complaints can generally go to /dev/null.

Due to obvious copyright issue and laziness, we will NOT be archiving or mirroring content off of corporate media web sites. If someone else wants to do it, that's fine, but we've put too much time into this pile of bits to throw it away when an arrogant photographer or his employer wants to prove a point. We'll simply provide links to a few good ones, but do expect them to go dry (and expect us not to notice or care).

In summary, we will only arrange, categorize, rename, resize and distribute original images with no visual modifications or cropping without the original photographer's consent. At any time we discover an original claim of copyright, we will do our best to reproduce that claim, but we will not remove any copyright messages or release any works with a revoked or nullified copyright claim.

COPYING

We respectfully ask that you do not mirror any DCP-original content, and use some common courtesy if you decide you want a personal copy of any of the images stored here. They do still belong to the original photographer (and, in most cases, the subjects themselves) and we would prefer that you do not take up so much of our bandwidth that you are affecting other viewers. Ultimately, if you want to steal these pictures too, we would request that you get them from the original site URL which we post with each archive. We will utilize inhumane tactics to prevent abuse.

We do explicitly deny any person, corporation or organization from reproducing any of the content of this web page in hardcopy or removable media such as compact disk or floppy for storage or distribution on anything other than a not for profit and informal fair use web site. This includes "original" content such as DCP-related text and images as well as the archived images obtained from this site. There is the possibility that non-apparent modifications of the images may result in the inclusion of a watermark or other identifying information, and any infraction of the above request may be met with a lawsuit.

TODO

Possible abilities available for future implementation include searching for specific folks and allowing copyright holders and/or unrelated DCP staff to maintain portions of the site archives. The searching is going to prove to be the most difficult, with many pictures having default names from image capture devices, and thumbnail galleries having useless or no captions. Perhaps we'll offer a call to our viewers in the future to send in names of unidentified bodies to further develop the search function.

CREDITS

Too many to mention, but primarily Jeff Moss for starting Def Con and keeping it alive. Each and every attendee and original photographer is certainly thanked for the ability to create this repository in the first place.

And we thank you, as viewers, for visiting and spreading the word about our little collection.