With the recent slashdot article decrying the Terms of Service which were touted as disrespectable (implied) just as the TOS for Chrome which were changed I wanted to talk about something I find important.
The Problem
While the idea of granting Google a license to use in whatever way they choose all the pictures you upload to Picasa or all of the text on your Blogger blog sounds scary, there are good reasons to do so.
The good reason, which was pointed out by many in the comments on , is that unless you granted Google a license under those terms they really couldn’t legally display or host your pictures or blog posts. I would like to take this moment to describe a better way of doing things.
The Suggestion
Aside: IANAL.
Any web service you use which allows the creation of user material (blogs, photo hosting, microblogging, etc) should also all you to set what license you want your material to be under. Ideally they would give you more chooses than just “Copyrighted” and “Public Domain.” Other chooses, like the Creative Commons family of licenses, would enable not only user freedom for online services but also to promote the adoption of Open and Free Content Licenses that we all appreciate (probably, we are Open people).
This is instead of just giving permission to Google (or whatever web service you are using) to use it as they wish. My suggestion also lets other people know what they can and can not do with your content in clear terms (in the case of CC licenses, the GFDL is a bit more complicated).
What you can do.
So, if the web services you use don’t support assigning a license to your content (which means that is it is then under full copyright restrictions, as per the law in the US) see if you can either add it yourself in the case of open source projects or request it in the case of proprietary ones. I’m looking at your Facebook.
For the Open Source web services, you can take a look at some software libraries Creative Commons has developed (LicenseChooser.js and libLicense) to save you time to make it license aware.
Aside 2: I am employed by Creative Commons.
Perhaps a useful thing would be an additional creative commons license you could tack on, called “Web Hostable” or something, which specifically granted anyone you uploaded it too the rights necessary to host and display it to other users.
If the big players accepted this type of license, users wouldnt have to worry about varied and over the top EULA clauses just to protect the hosts.
Posted by moo on September 10th, 2008.
@moo
Interesting idea. Something that is basically: “you can host my content, display it for third party users of your site, but not use my content in any promotional material or knowingly transfer said content to any third party hosting service.”
That part after the “but…” seems like it would be pretty hard to define legally and consistently, and at the same time convey the general message you propose.
For reference, see all of the current discussion about what constitutes a “NonCommercial” use of a work. Even with the carefully crafted legal code from Creative Commons there is still some doubt that anyone can say for certain a given use is or is not a Commercial Use.
But, your idea is interesting.
Posted by Greg on September 10th, 2008.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/its_time_for_a_new_terms_of_service_regime.php came to a similar conclusion.
+1 on both asides. :)
Posted by Mike Linksvayer on September 10th, 2008.
Yes.
I like the idea of self hosted services connected thru a central registry,
but if you MUST go with flicker, google, etc…I really like the idea of a new “Web Hostable” license.
Posted by joshp on September 10th, 2008.