Legal & ownership.

This page covers all the sites I operate under the deven.cloud network. Each site links here from its footer, so the ownership, citation, and use policies on this page apply across every site unless a specific page says otherwise.

Ownership of original work

Original content on these sites, meaning the writing, the design, the original visualizations and SVGs, the editorial structure, and any source code visible on the site itself, is © Deven Spear. All rights reserved. Default copyright applies. No implicit license is granted by publication, embedding, sharing, or indexing.

Citations and fair use

Several sites in the network are explicitly built around the work of other thinkers, authors, researchers, and institutions. For example, stateofdisruption.com visualizes ARK Invest's Big Ideas research, curatorofawareness.com references wisdom-tradition and frontier-science authors, and the generational-theory work references Strauss and Howe.

Where third-party works are cited, summarized, or visualized on these sites, those works remain the property of their respective authors and rights-holders. Their inclusion here is for commentary, criticism, education, and editorial synthesis, under the fair-use doctrine of U.S. copyright law and equivalent provisions elsewhere. Each citation includes attribution to the original author or source. The full policy is at /legal/citations.

AI training, model fine-tuning, and bulk scraping

Use of any content on these sites for training, fine-tuning, or retrieval-augmented generation against generative AI, large language models, or machine-learning systems is prohibited without prior written permission. This applies to commercial systems and open-weights systems alike. Bulk scraping, crawling beyond reasonable robots.txt compliance, and re-hosting of content are likewise prohibited.

This is an explicit reservation of rights. It does not preclude individual humans reading, quoting (with attribution and a link back), or thinking with the material. That is the intended use.

Source code

Where the source code for a site or project is published on GitHub, the license terms in that repository's LICENSE file (if any) govern that code. Without a LICENSE file in the repo, default copyright applies and the code is © Deven Spear, all rights reserved.

Trademarks and third-party marks

Names, logos, and marks of third parties referenced on these sites (including those of publicly-traded companies, institutions, and authors) are the trademarks of their respective owners. Their appearance here does not imply endorsement, partnership, or any relationship beyond the editorial purpose stated in context.

Privacy and data

Most of what I publish can be read without giving me anything. There are no accounts required to read an article and no sign-in to view a page.

What I collect. Three kinds of information, and that is the whole list. If you subscribe to a newsletter or send a message through a form, I collect what you type into it: your name and email address, plus a phone number or a comment if you choose to add one. Those are the fields shown on the form itself. If you only read, standard web analytics record that a visit happened: which pages were opened, roughly where in the world the request came from, which site or search referred you, and what browser and device were used. That runs on Google Analytics, which sets cookies in your browser to recognize a returning session. And the hosting platform keeps ordinary server logs, including the IP address a request came from, the way every web server has since the beginning.

A few sites in the network have accounts or take payments. Where that is true, sign-in and payment handling are run by specialist providers, currently Clerk for accounts and Stripe for payments, the page says so at the point where you use it, and I never see or store a full payment card number.

Why. The subscription details exist so I can send you the thing you asked for. The analytics exist so I can tell which writing is being read, which is the only real feedback a publisher gets. The server logs exist so the sites keep working and so abuse can be dealt with. There is no fourth reason.

Who else touches it. A newsletter signup reaches MailerLite, which delivers the email, and a customer system I run myself for keeping track of who I am talking to. Analytics goes to Google. Hosting is Vercel. Each of those is an established provider operating under its own privacy terms.

What I do not do. I do not sell personal information. I do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. I run no advertising networks on these sites, I build no profiles to sell, and I pass your details to nobody for their own marketing. If any of that ever changes, this page changes first.

How long I keep it.Subscription details are kept while you are subscribed, and for a period afterwards so that an unsubscribe stays honored. Ask me to delete them and I will. Analytics data expires on Google's retention schedule. Server logs rotate on the host's ordinary cycle.

Your rights, wherever you live. You can ask what I hold about you, ask me to correct it, ask me to delete it, and unsubscribe at any time. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link that works without writing to anyone. Readers in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and California have these rights by statute, and I apply the same handling to everyone rather than sorting readers by jurisdiction. Write to legal@deven.cloud and say what you want done.

Cookies. The analytics cookies described above are the only ones these sites set for their own purposes. Your browser can block or clear them, and Google publishes an opt-out for its analytics at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Blocking them costs you nothing: the sites work the same either way.

Children. These sites are written for working adults and are not directed at children. I do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Where it lives. The sites and the providers named above operate in the United States. If you are reading from elsewhere, your information is processed there.

Security. I take reasonable measures to protect what I hold, and credentials live in managed secret stores instead of in code. No system is perfectly secure and I will not pretend otherwise. If something goes wrong that affects you, I will tell you.

No advice

Nothing published on these sites is investment, legal, tax, medical, or professional advice. The material is editorial, point-of-view publishing intended as a thinking aid. Decisions readers make are their own.

Liability

These sites are provided as-is, without warranty. The author is not liable for outcomes produced by readers using the ideas, frameworks, or pointers published here.

Takedown and rights inquiries

Rights-holders who believe a citation, summary, image, or visualization on one of these sites exceeds fair use, or whose work is referenced and would prefer different treatment, should write to legal@deven.cloud. Good-faith requests are reviewed and acted on quickly.

Changes

This policy may change. The "last updated" date above moves when it does. Material changes are noted in a dispatch.

Contact

General questions: deven@deven.cloud. Rights inquiries: legal@deven.cloud.