ToS BS

Regarding Diffs:

I signed up under ToS 1.1. The current is 1.5. The diffs are here. Lots of differences. While under LJ alone, the newer ToS wasn't a big issue, because they were "wink and nod" lawyer CYAs. With Six Apart, though, I think they'll drive a fucking mack truck through the whole thing, and screw us sans lube in the process. After all, we never had to re-agree to the new ToS in order to log back in. (FYI, I was already logged in, and won't have to submit formally to the new regime until I have to log back in, IIRC.

[Edit]
Yes, the advertising stuff was in there, but with the owners saying that they wouldn't, it wasn't a worry.. The obscenity stuff was there, but again, it was just used to club the egregious people and keep the lawyers happy. With Six Apart, I don't have that warm fuzzy feeling.

As I responded to another person elsewhere:
I give it six months, actually, for ads to start popping up.

They'll also go to a multitiered pricing structure, with how much you pay determining how many entries and comments you can make per month. Free users will still exist, but they will be cut to one user icon, and one post per week and one comment per day.

I'm not paranoid, I've seen this type of thing go down before. The fastest way to make me squirm with an ISP or an employer is to say "We've just been bought by ... and nothing will change except for the better!" It's invariably a lie, IME. It may take a year, but it happens, like the tide. The first time it happened to me was in 1982. Does that tell you that this just might not be a fluke?

Err, that should have read "a more multitiered pricing structure..."

and

I never had to agree to the newer ToS before signing in. The enforcement, and the dealings I've had regarding Six Apart before, are fueling my "paranoia".

I won't bail, if only to be around to tell you "I told you so" when Six Apart drops the hammer. I've been through this type of service provider merger/buyout before, and it is never pretty for the smaller company, and its loyal users.

Several times burned, several times shy.

So all you people who call me "overreacting", "far fetched" and "paranoid" can get stuffed. I know what my gut says, and I am seldom wrong, unfortunately. I saw what Six Apart did to their user community with the move from MT 2.6 to MT 3.x, and it wasn't pretty.

Yes, I'd love to be proven wrong over the next year. But I doubt I will be.

Idiocy

I woke up this morning hoping it all was a bad dream. The way my day went yesterday, it could have been. But no. We've still been sold up the river. Then I read more comments to my comments in someone else's journal. I hate young, arrogant snots who think they've got all the answers.

So, I go through and read the ToS like a Six Apart lawyer would, all shiny and new, therefore I'm overly paranoid? Fuck you, Mr Smirking Skinhead. LJ had stuff in there to CYA. Six Apart will use that like a license to drive, right over us.

Yes, I cherry-picked phrases - the lawyers will too.

I was none too pleased with some of the stuff in the ToS to begin with, but it was a small outfit, and I figured they just lifted someone elses ToS, or portions of it, to use for their service. The owners made it very clear that they believed in free speech, and would use the least restrictive means to police content. Now a money-grubbing corporation that regards users as "assets" is going to be applying and enforcing those little cherry-pickable phrases.

Please note: as a personal policy I don't engage in flame wars in other people's journals (communities are a different story). I believe it rude. But two know-it-all jerks with superior attitudes made me rethink that policy. It still stands, however.

I value my friendships more than I do the need to put punks in their place. I'm a grown up, how about that? At 40+ I should be... ;-)

Correction

OK, I may be in error, in part: As of this morning, I did not have to agree to a ToS in order to log in. So my fears on that are a bit premature. Still, I think that with the perl error code at the top of the ToS it is only a matter of time.

I still am unsure about the under 13 thing - I think this could force the rest of us to make all content COPPA compliant, and lead to draconian enforcement of what used to be just boiler plate.

Note to self and others: Review the ToS quarterly, not just maybe once a year.

Analysis

See this entry for another analysis of the changes, especially wrt ads, open source, and communication. I have not yet read the rehash of the "Social Contract" into "Guiding Principles", but I've always taken the Social Contract to be a modifier on the ToS. I will edit this post more once I have read the new one.

This post is another commentary on the issue. Also not happy.

To balance things out, here's a business type blogger perspective.

Diif of the Social Contract versus "Guiding Principles"

Broken down by area of change. Comments later.

Name, and concept
< Social Contract
< Our Promise to You
---
> LiveJournal.com Guiding Principles

Promises versus Principles
< We at LiveJournal try to ensure that our service is as pleasant as possible for each user, so
< we've assembled a list of promises we will keep.
< We stand firm in saying that we will:
---
> Our Principles
> We at LiveJournal try to make our service a pleasant experience for our users, so we've assembled
> a list of business principles that help guide our operation of the LiveJournal service.
> We operate the LiveJournal service with the following goals:

Changes, and Communication
< We promise to keep you informed of changes to the best of our abilities without being
< intrusive. We promise to run our business based on feedback from the LiveJournal community, and
< with the LiveJournal community's best interests in mind.
---
> We will strive to keep you informed of changes to the best of our abilities without being
> intrusive, and to run our business based on feedback from the LiveJournal community, with the
> LiveJournal community's best interests in mind.

Accounts, perm and early adopter
< Permanent accounts will be honored for the life of the site. Paid accounts will remain as
< paid accounts until they expire, unless they are renewed in advance. Early adopters will be
< granted access to the paid features that were freely available in the early history of the site.
< (Account status valid with the exception of account termination by means of Terms of Service
< violation.)
---
> We fully intend to honor the status of our users' accounts, as follows: Permanent accounts
> will be honored for the life of the service. Paid accounts will remain as paid accounts until
> they expire, unless they are renewed in advance. Early adopters will be granted access to the
> paid features that were freely available in the early history of the site. (Account status valid
> with the exception of account termination by means of Terms of Service violation.)

Uptime
< Maintain reliable uptime within the limits of technical considerations
< We try to keep things running smoothly for everyone, especially since we use the system just
< as much as anyone else. Unfortunately server hangups do occur, but we will plan ahead as best as
< possible to avoid them.
---
> Maintain reliable uptime
> We try to keep things running smoothly for everyone, especially since we use the system, too.
> Unfortunately, server hangups do occur, but we will plan ahead to try to avoid them.

Ads
< Avoid advertisements
< As it's one of our larger pet peeves, we'll avoid putting advertisements on the site.
< Although our Terms of Service permits us to change our policy in the future, we've found
< throughout the past few years that our "paid accounts" business model has worked wonderfully,
< making banners ads unnecessary.
---
> Avoid banner advertisements
> As it's one of our larger pet peeves, we have avoided putting banner advertisements on the
> site. Although our Terms of Service permits us to change our policy in the future, we've found
> throughout the past few years that our "paid accounts" business model has, so far, made banners
> ads unnecessary.

Spam/UCE
< Never send you unsolicited e-mail
< We strongly believe that spam has no place on the internet, and we promise never to send you
< any e-mail without your implied or explicit consent. We promise to never sell lists of users'
< e-mail addresses or personal information, and we promise never to spam on the behalf of an
< interested third party.
---
> Avoid spam
> We strongly believe that spam has no place on the internet, and we endeavor not to send you
> e-mail without your implied or explicit consent. When you sign up for the Service, we understand
> that to mean you want to communicate with us and hear from us about our products and services. If
> we do send you a message or contact you, we give you an option to opt-out so that we won't send
> you similar messages in the future. We are not in the business of selling lists of users' e-mail
> addresses or personal information, though we may share users' information under certain special
> circumstances, such as with an entity that owns or is owned by LiveJournal, with our service
> providers and vendors in connection with the operation of the service and our business, where we
> think it is appropriate or required by law or to protect our legal rights, or if the business is
> being sold or reorganized. (For more information on these special circumstances, click here.)

Open Source
< All of the code that is used to run a complete, highly-customizable LiveJournal installation
< is available to the public. We promise to keep this source free and open so that we can give
< something back to the Free Software community.
---
> We're big supporters of Open Source software - we have used it and contributed to it
> extensively. As part of our contribution to the Open Source community, we have made available to
> the public a large amount of source code for software that we've used to run the LiveJournal
> service, and that contributed source code will remain free and open. We plan to continue to give
> back to the community by contributing certain bug fixes, testing, documentation and new code. In
> addition, we continue to encourage people to innovate using the open source code we have
> contributed.

Weird...

My cookie must have expired, because I had to log back in just now. No ToS stuff, but that was certainly odd. It usually doesn't do that...

Will the real ToS please stand up...

THIS is the CVS repository with the actual tos.bml in it. The current one is actually rev 1.7! I haven't had time to do the diffs, or look them over. One little statistic... "Changes since 1.6: +46 -1 lines"

Now, while the other file may, in fact, be the same content, legal-tos.bml is not what is displayed, tos.bml is.

In other news, people are starting to have to submit to the new regime in order to log in and post, apparently.

I am not sure why this sets my teeth on edge. Maybe it's all the stuff about credit card "changes", click through licenses, and loyalty oaths coming together to tick me off - yet another place where I have to dance with weasels lawyers to live my life. (At $Job the $ParentCompany has an overabundance of BS procedures in place to comply with Sairbanes-Oxley. It's overkill, IMO, because they're applying it to systems that have no (zero) financial data on them. All because of overzealous lawyers, again.)

Edit: Weird. The web client is being very flaky tonight...