The jyte Terms of Service include some chilling clauses.
By
Oscar J Carlton IV
on February 24, 2007
Looks like Adblock is illegal, and any "automated" use of the services is forbidden. How do we use the API's without making automated use of the services? Is subscribing to an RSS feed an automated use of the services?
Also, the statement that claims can be made about "anything" is not actually true according to http://jyte.com/site/tos
Oh, and you can't claim "information that you know is false or misleading".
Finally, if you encourage people to buy a good or service, or advance at jyte's sole discretion any business interests, you could be required to pay $50 for each person that reads the claim.
I'm not accusing them of abusing the contract, but it's an interesting read.
Agreed
46
8
85.2% 14.8%
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- 22-5 If I own my comments, other users should not be allowed to delete them along with their accounts.
- 4-5 Repeating information provided by another user is not a violation of the Jyte Terms of Service.
- 21-2 Impersonating someone else should be against myopenid.com 's terms of service
- 4-4 Jules/HappyWrap/ Has a picture with Ron Paul once again presents data that suggests that he is much older than twelve years old.
- 41-10 Jyte is created of geeks, for geeks, by geeks.
Discussion (17)
Yeah, I looked over it. Most of it is pretty standard CYA. I'm just hoping it'll be applied well. What a company's ToS is isn't usually as relevant as how it's applied.
I'm an Adblock user. Ads waste my bandwidth and theirs. Considering I wasn't planning on clicking any ads anyway, why should I be forced to see them.
px, did you post about the tos right before or right after me? I didn't see yours; didn't mean to steal your thunder.
Judging from the Jyte spy, it was before. But I dont care, they are still fundamentally different in my eyes.
Did they just add the ToS today?
Embedding claims is forbidden.
er, not quite, but "retransmission" of content on the site is, although they go out of their way to say that the claimants still own the text of their claims.
The ToS was here when I joined. I remember looking over it. It's not that bad - we keep the rights to our content. And it doesn't allow anyone under the age of 14, which avoids a whole bunch of COPPA headaches. But it does allow under 18 year olds, which means there could be issues with exposing minors to adult content.
re: adult content...
STDs are Sexy
This is the very first claim under featured claims... perhaps not the impression Jyte wants to have.
It's probably featured, because we're actively commenting, and voting on it.
A few hours ago, I noticed the #1 featured was
doctors, lawyers, and c level...
just a guess.
Yeah... I just think it's funny.
They seem to be a fairly progressive bunch; I imagine they could clean up the agreement and still maintain ass coverage. Parts of it conflict with itself; Sec 4.6 list as prohibited content that "provides any telephone numbers, street addresses, last names, URLs or email addresses;", but in other places it says you can include URLs in your profile and elsewhere.
I wouldn't call it chilling. Any serious TOS ends up being amusing. It's funny that the Jyte TOS forbids any use of Jyte. That's the nature of these things. AFAICT it actually avoids things that would be really chilling (like geocities-style content ownership), which I see as positive.
I read it as "we can kick you off and delete all your content whenever we want", which I expect - if I ran a site that let people contribute I wouldn't publish anyone's content without something explicit like that up front.
Hey everybody ... we put this TOS up as a boiler plate to keep our lawyer happy ... however, we need to rethink some of it because some of the points are just plain broken. Be glad that we spent more time making the site great than actually having a great TOS ... that said, we're open to changing/fixing/making it better because we're here to serve all of you. Be looking for more from us on this in the very near future.
Thank you for making the site. I know how much of a PITA trying to CYA decently can be. I figured you just wanted to make a decent site, but you don't want to get hurt badly for doing so. ToS are always tricky things.
I hope I didn't sound harsh.