Leaderboard

I confess I was horrified. I realize that I am possibly the newest member of this society and so not a member of long standing or reputation, but I feel compelled to say something. In my career I have worked with a number of commercial and public bodies to develop and execute digital strategies. In many of these cases I have helped draft and deploy terms of service for users/members. I have to say that the ToS on PalmTalk is the most onerous I have ever seen. When we developed the ToS at the BBC, we had armies of lawyers go over our drafts and never did we see anything so bad. The worst portion is this: By posting Contributions to any part of the Websites, or making them accessible to the Websites by linking your account to any of your social network accounts, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right and license to host, use, copy, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, archive, store, cache, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, transmit, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such Contributions for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Contributions, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. The use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels. Such use and distribution license will apply to any form, media, or technology now known or hereafter developed. By uploading your Contributions, you hereby warrant that your Contributions are free of any digital rights management, including any software designed to limit the number of times the Contributions may be copied or played. Company may retain archived copies of your Contributions. Company does not assert any ownership over your Contributions; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in this Agreement, you retain full ownership of all of your Contributions and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your Contributions. In essence, you can take of my contributions, alter them in any way you see fit, and then resell it either with my name attached or not, and profit from it. But it gets worse, if, like many people, we post a link to another site we then also surrender the same rights to anything on those sites. This is the biggest rights grab I have ever seen attempted. You have not offered members any voice in editing these Terms of Service, or any means of opting out or having their previous contributions, not made under this ToS, to be removed and segregated in some way. If you are going to be greedy, the least you can do for your members is to offer them an elegant way out. By simply grabbing rights and not offering members any way of redacting their earlier contributions is just simply theft. I am confident that NO such malevolent intent existed when these ToS were written. I am hoping this was simply a task that rested in the hands of someone without experience in such matters. If so, I would highly recommend working WITH your precious community, to create something that serves that community, instead of picking its pocket.

Don't over react like so many of the 'sky is falling' people that love the chaos it brings here do. The IPS is a non-profit. Do you think they are going to resell your photos? You make it sound like the group has a vindictive nature. Maybe this is just boilerplate language that needs to be corrected. I find it better to point out the stuff that is wrong, and work with the people who put this up. But others love to try and take their jabs. I agree that a measured action should take place to fix this and I hope that is what happens. But I don't feel I am overreacting. There are photos of the place where I live and personal details about me and my family here. This place has been robbed in the past and i would hate for that to happen again. In my experience, non profits are the most active at selling member data and content -- I've worked with some of the biggest online communities and we all need to establish rules of behaviour/terms of service. Most of these are similar. In my experience, organizations include the kinds of IPR clause found in this new ToS only when they intend to use them. They always cause a lot of anxiety and result in membership decay. I've seen membership decay of 15-60% in public communities as a result of IPR rules like these. The more sophisticated guys to a little rights grabbing every year and eventually get what they want without alienating more than 5-10% of the membership. So I would say that at the very least this is a clumsy IPR grab. But it might also be a calculated attempt to prune the user base of members that are of no real use or benefit to the IPS in which case this could be fairly effective but a real hassle -- better to shut the whole thing down and start again with a strict application process ot join the community. It should be remembered that, if the IPS really wants to be a research-lead organization targeting academia, there many universities would never allow their profs to agree to such an IPR share as it is they, or so they believe, who own all the IPR coming out of their profs. On the other hand, this could simply be a case of the decision makers not really bothering to read the ToS and consider its consequences or preparing he membership. I don't know what the IPS leadership is like so I couldn't say. But it's not uncommon for such important docs to go out without proper scrutiny. But I do agree Len, a quorum of experienced people, in consultation with the membership and management, should reword this for the benefit of all in the calm light of day. The IPR section of this ToS actually opens the IPS up to all sorts of liabilities along with revenue opportunities. So if the real intent was legal protection, claiming some rights beyond your domain is not a good way of doing it. In the meantime, I think it is perfectly reasonable to either suspend the new ToS until such time as the document can pass a consultation process within the management and membership, or allow members to suspend their accounts and all content they have created that would otherwise fall prey to the new IPR terms. This shows respect for the membership and gives them the chance to proactively grant rights to the IPS rather than allow the IPS to simply take without asking.

Don't over react like so many of the 'sky is falling' people that love the chaos it brings here do. The IPS is a non-profit. Do you think they are going to resell your photos? You make it sound like the group has a vindictive nature. Maybe this is just boilerplate language that needs to be corrected. I find it better to point out the stuff that is wrong, and work with the people who put this up. But others love to try and take their jabs.