Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Why I hate terms of service

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Why I hate terms of service

At least when they're written by evil clueless lawyers. For instance, from the Bloglines TOS:

5. PROHIBITED USES

You agree that you will not: ... g. use the Service in any manner other than as expressly authorized in the TOS; h. use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content on the Service;

Except, A. they don't expressly authorize any manner of use in the TOS, and B. provision 5-h is so general that it prevents things like copying text to the clipboard or printing something out using a printer.

Permalink | 4 Comments | id 5316

04:52 (utc-4)

Comments

Aggelos wrote:

You actually read those things?!

∴ Aggelos | 25-Aug-2004 5:57am est | #5354

no meta, no header and no robots, so the folks at google are intended to manually review the tos before indexing their site?

∴ jixor | 25-Aug-2004 8:49am est | http://www.jixor.com | #5355

So, what are you trying to say -- that I'm a Taco Bell kind of guy?

How would you remedy this problem, friend -- better TOS, no TOS, free ice cream for the cool kids on Tuesdays?

Free ice cream would be awesome, but I think they should write better TOS. They should have TOS -- they just shouldn't be overreaching and self-contradictory.

∴ Keith | 25-Aug-2004 6:17pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #5362

Feel free to post a comment below. Please see my comment policy.

Formatting Rules (No HTML):

**bold**, *italic*, _underlined_, --strikeout--
"text"="url" creates a link, and URLs are auto-highlighted
Blockquote: Like e-mail, begin paragraph with > (greater-than sign)
Lists: begin paragraph with *,-, or + (unordered), or # (ordered)
Code block: ?!code:language=perl|php|sql|javascript|etc.{\n}...{\n}?!/code

RSS feed RSS feed for Keith's Weblog
Atom feed Atom feed for Keith's Weblog
Weblog archive
Recent comments
on 3 posts