Major Suckage

[ravan]

Shoot the fucking lawyers at Danga/LJ. Their new ToS sucks boulders through cocktail straws.

Examples:
* Registration "obligations": During registration, all users are required to provide accurate, complete and current information about themselves in all required fields. and Should LiveJournal.com suspect that your personal information is not complete, current, or accurate, your account may be subject to suspension or termination. So, essentially, pseudononymous users like me are fucked.
* Advertisements: No, they won't do it now, but they reserve the right to do it in the future, with or without prior notice, and you can't change your options if the do.
* Can't post "obscene, vulgar, hateful" stuff: Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is in LiveJournal.com's opinion to be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy... , hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; Great, there go most of my rants, and the childfree community will get fucked over, fast, by all of the trolls and whiners who don't like it.
* Sell you your own content back: LiveJournal.com also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's LiveJournal back to that individual. Sure, you retain "copyright", but they own it??
* Post content about violence: ... This may include, but is not limited to, providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or incendiary devices; Great, you can find this type of data in a public library in the US, on the ground in other countries, but it's forbidden on LJ??
* Volunteer Enslavement: ...LiveJournal.com member agrees that the intellectual content created as a result of volunteer work for LiveJournal.com constitutes intellectual property of LiveJournal.com and that all rights in said content shall vest in LiveJournal.com at the time that it is created. ... Well, I can't volunteer on LJ, even if I wanted to. Sure, they "get" Open Source... NOT!!!

Read the thing, with all of the lawyer talk for "we let you think you have rights, but buried in the legalese is your enslavement for the 'privilege' of being allowed to use our site, and the privilege of paying for it."

FUCK YOU, DANGA LAWYERS, FUCK YOU AND THE BUYOUT YOU RODE IN ON!!!!!

Edit: Yes, a lot of this stuff was there before, but now Six Apart will be doing the enforcing from a business perspective, and in a COPPA friendly environment. This makes a difference. My gut says that allowing kids onto the site will actually fuck over the adult content, and all posts, public or not, will have to pass kiddie standards.

No, I don't trust Six Apart.

Comments

[burr86.livejournal.com]

for the record, all this information was in the old version of the TOS as well. ;)

[swerved.livejournal.com]

Except that all of things were in the old TOS as well, nothing has changed except to grant more disclaimers about liability and such. There is no real change. The only thing you should be worried about is how they enforce the TOS. IF Six Apart sticks to the same way of handling things that the current abuse team does, there will be few issues. If they decide to start cracking down on things that could technically have been hammered on before now with the old TOS, that's when you have to worry.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

We're royally fucked then.

Re: Major Suckage

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

heya -- i am here through a link on dubhain's LJ.

all of what you are complaining about is not new; it was already in the ToS you originally agreed to when you created your account.

and as far as i can see, nothing significant has changed about the registration information -- you can remain pseudonymous; they are not asking you for your name or address. what change there is regards users under 13, and for them the change is positive -- they were previously not allowed to have an LJ at all; now they can if their legal guardian permits it.

you must have never read the ToS before, if you're just now getting upset about it. LJ has in the past not enforced a huge number of those restrictions, and has generally decided in favour of free speech -- i know because while working in LJ abuse i've had to explain about a gazillion times to somebody why their ex-friend could say all those hateful, abusive, racially objectionable things, but as long as the friend didn't post identifying private information or actively threatened them with harm, we were just not gonna do anything about it.

yes, it's possible that could change. six apart comes from a totally different culture, and they might just reel backwards if they happen to investigate a single day's worth of abuse reports. until that happens, i wouldn't worry. if it happens, it might actually improve the service (i have no patience for all the assholes whose main goal in life seems to be to follow others around and make their lives miserable).

[kyra.livejournal.com]

Most of this was there to begin with. Speaking as a volunteer abuseling who's worked pretty extensively with the Terms of Service, there's not much new under the sun, here.

This (http://cvs.livejournal.org/browse.cgi/ljcom/htdocs/inc/legal-tos.diff?r1=1.4&r2=1.5&f=h) is a comparison of old and new.