General Considerations

Fairness for Injured Patients Act Coalition (FIPA) products and materials may not be used to state or imply the endorsement by FIPA or by any FIPA employee of a commercial product, service or activity, or used in any other manner that might be misleading.

However, FIPA should be acknowledged as the source of its information and material. Accordingly, we request that FIPA be cited as the source of information or material used and that any photo credits or bylines be similarly credited to the photographer or author or FIPA, as appropriate.

You may link freely to the FIPA Web site or any of its content. We request that you identify that the link is to a FIPA Internet resource.

Site Disclaimer

The documents on this Web site may contain hypertext pointers to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. Please be aware that we do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of this outside information.

Any translation of these documents into languages other than English is intended solely as a convenience to the non-English-reading public. We have attempted to provide an accurate translation of the text, but the official text is the English text, and any differences in the translation are not binding and have no legal effect. References identifying the original document in English are available in most non-English documents.

Privacy

FIPA is strongly committed to maintaining the privacy of your personal information and the security of our computer systems. With respect to the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, FIPA makes every effort to ensure compliance with applicable federal law, including, but not limited to, The Privacy Act of 1974, The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, and The Freedom of Information Act.

As a general rule, the FIPA Coalition does not collect personally-identifiable information about you when you visit our site, unless you choose to provide such information to us. The information we receive depends upon what you do when visiting our site.

If you respond to an online request for personal information:

Generally, the information requested by The FIPA Coalition will be used to respond to your inquiry or to provide you with the service associated with the request. However, when this information is requested, the reasons for collecting it with a description of the FIPA’s intended use of the information will be fully described in a customized “Privacy Notice.” This Privacy Notice will either appear on the Web page collecting the information or be accessible through a link prominently displayed immediately preceding the information request.

If you visit our site to read or download information:

For site management purposes, we collect statistical information. FIPA uses this information to determine interest in various areas of the site and to monitor system performance. We do not collect personally identifiable information or attempt to identify individual users and their usage patterns. We collect and store only the following information:

• The name of the domain from which you access the Internet (for example, FairnessAct.com, if you are connecting from the FIPA computer account).

• The date and time you access our site.

• The Internet address of the Web site from which you linked directly to our website.

• The duration of a visit.

If you identify yourself by sending an e-mail containing personal information:

You also may decide to send us personally identifiable information, for example, your mailing address, in an electronic mail message requesting that information be mailed to you. Information collected in this manner is used solely for responding to requests for information or records. We may forward your e-mail to other members of the coalition who are better able to respond to you.

If you link to other sites outside FIPA :

Our Web site has many links to other sites. When you link to any of these sites, you are no longer on our site and are subject to the privacy policy of the new site.

Security

For security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, our Web site also employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, to cause harm, or otherwise cause damage.

Unauthorized attempts to upload information or change information on this service are strictly prohibited. Unauthorized use, tampering with or modification of this system—including supporting hardware or software—may subject the violator to criminal or civil penalties. In the event of unauthorized intrusion, all relevant information regarding possible violations of law may be provided to law enforcement officials.

Cookie Use Notice

A cookie is a small piece of text placed on a client computer by a Web site server when the client first visits the site. This text is subsequently used by the server to personalize the client browsing experience; track client page clicks for statistical purposes, etc. In technical terms, a cookie allows the stateless HTTP protocol to maintain client state.

There are two types of cookies – a “session” cookie that is stored on your computer’s primary memory and deleted when you close your browser, and a “persistent” cookie that is stored on your hard drive and is available to the server even after you close and reopen your browser.

The FIPA Coalition web site uses only session cookies. However, we use an external service to track site usage statistics, and the external service provider places a persistent cookie on your hard drive. No cookies used by the FIPA Coalition ever store any information that may be used to identify you personally.