Wanted to bump this. I have a link to a current working draft, based entirely off of David Morley’s modifications of the Wordpress TOS.
Here’s what I want to get everyone thinking about: phrasing and necessary cleanup aside, what kind of modifications should we make for a general-use TOS? Should we omit items? Should we add them?
Hi Sean, this looks good to me. I haven’t been through it with a fine-toothed comb yet, but will do. It looks like a good starting point, though.
I think it would be worth asking someone with legal expertise in this field to have a look at it - perhaps worth doing by a shout-out via the Diaspora HQ account? Probably worth getting them to give it the once-over before we do much alteration so they can alert us to any potential issues with the ToS as it stands, and then once when we’ve made all our changes to make sure that there are no pitfalls left in it.
I see Dennis and co have already done this for German pod-runners, which is brilliant. It may be that we can take much of that, but if it is specific to German law it might not apply to other pods.
What established services are out there which pull in data from other services? Thinking like a blog or news accumulator or similar, ones which take data from other providers. Their TsoS might give us good clues as to how we might account for the fact that content comes from various sources not all under the podmin’s control. We could find out that way if there are legal pitfalls in this.
Copyrighted content is an issue that does need to be addressed at some point, as if/when Diaspora gets big enough, copyright holders will start to sit up and take notice. It’s something we raised with the guys when they were creating Makrio, because that’s almost exclusive about content appropriated from other sources. Perhaps you could ask how they’ve addressed this. One way of at least mitigating it might be to code it so that if media (image/audio/video file) are embedded in Diaspora, when you move the cursor over it a pop-up appears which contains the source, where this was taken from. If the media are embedded from other sources rather than uploaded to D*'s servers, this should be possible, I’d think. I expect a disclaimer in the ToS to the effect 'please make sure you have permission from copyright holders to upload whatever to D*‘s servers before doing so’ would help. Embedding things such as YouTube videos where an embed code is specifically provided by the source site can’t carry any copyright problems from that site - and if the content on that site (eg YouTube) is there without permission from copyright holders, that must be YouTube’s problem rather than ours. But good to get a law type to look at this.
3,4. Not sure about these yet. Might have further ideas once I’ve read the Tos more carefully, but might not be able to do that for a while.
I could strip out references to David/diasp.org and so on from the draft, if you’d like, to generalise it, but would it be best to discuss some of the potential issues first and decide how we’re going to approach it? I don’t know, just thinking aloud.
I’m afraid I honestly don’t know much at all about the issues brought up by writing TsoS, but hope some of these thoughts are useful.