Look But Don’t Touch
(Explicit Consent for Use & Research)

There are five kinds of research that we are concerned with in our programs, sites, and activities:

Demographic

We are happy to share demographic data. Just ask us, and let us know what you’re using it for. If you grab it off our website, you must credit the source.

Business/Administrative

We are as open an organization as we can reasonably be. If you’d like to know something about our business structure, just ask us. We keep a lot of organizational information on our website, and we believe our model is replicable and we want you to use it. Go forth and multiply! If you use it, you must credit the source. Some information or creations may contain more restrictive rights, and generally if you want to sell something we essentially made for exactly the same purpose without crediting us or hiring us, you’re a big jerk and it might expose you to legal action. But if you do it, we hope you impact thousands of lives in a positive way.

Pedagogical

Any participant – learner, instructor, or community partner, has access to proprietary tools, techniques, and information. The level of permission you need to acquire before using them varies depending on what it is. We are trying to be as clear as we can, follow the law, help you follow the law, protect our work, and provide the most inexpensive, relevant language & culture learning experiences possible.

Any person can use, collect, or sell any techniques that they hear about, experience, observe, or read about from us without permission. We borrow techniques from other teachers all the time, and we also know that everyone does everything a little bit differently.  Our interest is to expand the effectiveness of language & cultural skills practitioners everywhere. But, you know, if we provided you with significant inspiration for your technique and practice – especially if you want to receive income from that (such as by teaching people for pay), it would be really nice of you to give us credit when people say “you’re such a great teacher!”

If you are a Member of P-P-T, you are able to use tools (such as curriculum or attendance records) that we provide anywhere you wish,  but you need to credit P-P-T (keeping our logo on the materials is the best way to do it). Many of our tools & materials announce their own intellectual property condition right on them. Don’t sell the things we’ve made in a substantially unaltered form without letting us know, that’s just jerky and we’ll totally bar you from Membership and opportunities with us, and pursue legal action if we can.  Owners will have more access and ability to use P-P-T tools for other commercial ends.

If you are not a Member of P-P-T, your use of materials & tools that we’ve created is limited. You’ll need to buy it, receive it in one of our classes, workshops or presentations (or from someone who attended) in order to use it in your classroom or training program. Most of what you can get on the website you may use, copy, share, or distribute as long as you keep the P-P-T logo visible.

If you’re going to sell our tools & materials in substantially unaltered form, obviously, you’ll need written permission to do that or you will expose yourself to legal action.

Because P-P-T uses a lot of real-world materials, you might want to review our Materials Use Policy. Some things we use may have other rights that prevent you from reusing them in your classroom.

Consider a recipe. If I give you a recipe that I invented, and you make that dish for a dinner party, that’s probably what I intended.  You don’t always have to say that we gave it to you, but it sure is nice to do that.  Likewise if you use techniques we use in your own training program or create a compilation of activities.  Spread the techniques and if you appreciate us, tell others about us.

But we don’t permit you to take an activity that we use in a form that we’ve documented and try to copyright it and say that others can’t use that technique (you’d essentially be telling the world you wrote the recipe.)

Academic

We definitely want to partner with you, and we’d like a copy of your findings too!  We hope that our approach will be widely studied, appreciated, emulated, and critiqued; mostly, we’re concerned about protecting our partners and participants.   If you are in an accredited degree program or other training regimen , we’d like to chat with your advisor before you start work.  Failure to do this may expose you and the institution you represent to legal action.

If you’re a researcher for an academic or private institution, we assume that your commitment to professionalism will have you contacting us first before you gather and arrange data on or in any of our programs.

No one is permitted to do any kind of scientific/methodological research without an explicit description of the goals, activities, and confidentiality measures in place + written permission from P-P-T.

Media & Publishing

If you’re writing a story on us, you may use any information on our website at will. You may interview any program participants (instructors, learners, or site personnel) outside the course of a P-P-T event but their words are their own.  If you want an official statement or interview of any person who works with P-P-T, or to record or otherwise document any of P-P-Ts learning environments (especially for public education or information), you’ll need to arrange that beforehand in writing with an authorized representative of P-P-T.

Of course, you may interview any of our previous partners, graduates, or associates but their words will be their own and not necessarily represent P-P-T’s position or perspective.