Presence

Holy Cow. I saw eebmore posted about new Terms of Service for Baltiblogs, and that he was considering moving because the terms could be seen as encroaching upon his freedom to discuss any number of things in the unique fashion in which he discusses them. Today I noticed a Terrablogs post about the new Terms of Service and decided to take a look to see what all the fuss was about, and noticed a few things that, frankly, shocked me.

For one:

2. Privacy Policy. By using this Service, you agree, without limitation or qualification, to be bound by this Privacy Policy: You have no privacy.

Ooooo-kay...that's pretty vague, and although it might just be a matter of expedience, it's a bit ominous. I guess I don't really put anything here that I wouldn't mind someone else seeing, as it is a blog and all. But still, a bit more finesse in explaining what you inteded to do with my information would be nice.

So I started worrying about things like copyright, and sure enough, further down:

6. Information Rights. The Proprietor does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service, including without limitation comments you post to the Service, you grant the Proprietor world-wide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, non-exclusive, fully sub-licensable license(s) to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. (emphasis added)

Whoah! So basically, the price of a free blog is the Terrablogs gets free use of your content. I don't like that one bit, to the point that I am seriously considering moving off Baltiblogs. Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com, none of them make these kinds of restrictions. I've been nothing but happy with the service up to this point, in fact, I think the idea of a locale-centered blog portal is a brilliant idea, and a major reason why I chose Baltiblogs to begin with, and Penny and I have always contributed monetarily to the service. And I know Josiah and Nathan fairly well, and would consider them friends. But ownership of content is a big deal, and a deal-breaker, as far as I'm concerned.

As far as I can tell, Terrablogs would have the right to do whatever they wanted with any of my content, including photos I've uploaded. That would include photos on luminouslens or opinion pieces on Soccer Dad.

I'm hoping that we can work something out with Terrablogs, to ammend this clause in the policy. At the very least, I would have hoped that changes of this magnitude would have been communicated to the users in a more personal fashion. The nice thing about Baltiblogs has always been that we are all friends here, yet this is the type of move I would expect from a big corporation. Let's hope we can get this resolved.

Update: I've heard from Josiah and Nathan (see below) and they've been very helpful and are taking care of things. Awesome.

I will add, I am generally appalled by the increasingly common practice of using blogs as a form of interpersonal communication. All the time I see people blogging things as a way to expose a wrongdoing without first communicating with the other party and attempting to resolve things privately. I think it's generally a bad practice, and that we should not lose site of the fact that blogs and other social technology are meant to bring people closer together and enhance communication, not allow us to flame with greater ease and affect. I debated whether or not to post this or to resolve it privately, and made my decision based on the fact that this affected others and had the potential to strengthen the community as a whole if handled properly. That might all be BS, but whatever, I'm on codine.