The Merced Sun Star's User Agreement

Welcome to mercedsunstar.com, a news, information and communication service available on the Internet's World Wide Web. The service combines much of The Merced Sun Star newspaper with additional material available only on mercedsunstar.com. Both The Merced Sun Star and mercedsunstar.com are divisions of McClatchy Newspapers, Inc., a subsidiary of The McClatchy Company.

You must read, agree with and accept all of the terms and conditions contained in these Terms of Use before you may become a Member of mercedsunstar.com. By registering as a Member, and/or by accessing and using mercedsunstar.com, you agree to these Terms of Use.

From time to time, we may make changes to these Terms of Use by posting the changes in this location. Such notice will provide a date upon which the changes will be effective. Should you object to any such modifications to these Terms of Use or become dissatisfied with Mercedsunstar.com in any way, your only recourse is to immediately terminate your Membership and discontinue use of mercedsunstar.com. Otherwise, continuing to use the service after the effective date means that you agree to be bound by the changes.

Cost At this time, there is no cost for using the basic or premium services of mercedsunstar.com. From time to time there may be premium content available via subscription or surcharge, and those areas will be clearly marked. Because this is an advertising-supported service, we encourage you to patronize the advertisers that help to make this service possible.

The Merced Sun-Star's newspaper electronic archives carry a fee of $3.95 per full-text article downloaded. Note that most news articles remain available for seven days in the pages of mercedsunstar.com. Additional information, including credit card information may be required to complete this purchase.

Registration Access to special content, services and features on mercedsunstar.com requires users to be print subscribers to The Merced Sun Star and to register and become Members of mercedsunstar.com. Member registration requires you to provide certain Personally Identifiable Information, such as your name, e-mail address, street address, gender, and date of birth. Please see our Privacy Policy for information on mercedsunstar.com's information gathering and how we intend to use and share any information we collect. If you become a Member of mercedsunstar.com, you accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and for restricting access to your computer so others may not access mercedsunstar.com using your username or account in whole or in part. Mercedsunstar.com reserves the right to terminate Membership and deny access to the site to any person who violates this Terms Of Use.

Copyrights and trademarks Material published on mercedsunstar.com, including articles, photos, graphics, bulletin board postings, audio and video clips, and other content, is copyrighted by The Merced Sun Star, or by other information providers who have licensed their content for use on mercedsunstar.com. Additionally, the entire content of mercedsunstar.com is also copyrighted as a collective work under the United States copyright laws; the owner of the collective work is The Merced Sun Star. You cannot reproduce, republish or redistribute material from The Merced Sun Star, the Associated Press, the New York Times News Service, the Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service, Scripps Howard News Service, Newhouse News Service and other news services and syndicates in any way without the written consent of the copyright owner.