My PreSonus Blog Tips Are Ending

[Craig Anderton]

Maybe Craig could use the archives as source material for a new title ...

Interesting idea. It would probably take a lot of effort to separate out the pertinent info, and I'm sure re-writing and updating woudl be required. But it would be doable, as long as there weren't rights involved...if I had to get a release from everyone who contributed something cool, that would take close to forever!

 

[TonalDynamics]

Interesting idea. It would probably take a lot of effort to separate out the pertinent info, and I'm sure re-writing and updating woudl be required. But it would be doable, as long as there weren't rights involved...if I had to get a release from everyone who contributed something cool, that would take close to forever!

What's utterly insane is the power-grab of virtually all the ToSes with online platforms... not passing in the real world, ever.

Imagine the Anaheim convention center did this, "Well yes we'll rent the facility to you, but the staff is going to record the conversations of both you and your attendees, and we own the copyright to anything that's said because reasons. Just sign this paper here affirming as much and you're good to go!"

Something tells me it wouldn't fly with their clientele.

To be clear, I'm talking about the 'all-rights' boilerplate ToS vis a vis users posts on the forums (which 90% of forums do) that every tech company big and small gets away with, I know you've got your own deal with Presonus which supersedes it all.

In the U.S., you own the copyright to whatever you say and/or create the minute it is recorded in some way. They are abusing a loophole that allows transfers of that right via ToS contracts that no one reads.

It just burns my biscuits that title 17 can be abused this way!
This is of course but the least egregious crime of tech overreach, but in our present situation, a very relevant one.

Rambling on...

 

[Craig Anderton]

One aspect is that donating what you post to a service is the price of having a free service. But at least in my forum experience, forums mostly have a TOS to cover their butts. For example, suppose someone goes on a rant here about how everyone who uses Reaper is a devil-worshipper and should be poisoned. Because of the TOS, a moderator can delete that material because the forum owns it. The 1st Amendment says Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech, but this forum isn't Congress and can draw up whatever rules the moderators want to use regarding the ability of people to express themselves. By agreeing to the forum's TOS, it's almost impossible for someone to file a nuisance lawsuit based on some specious claim. Remember, lawsuits like that aren't initiated to win, they're initiated to incentivize the company to pay them something because it would be less expensive than hiring lawyers (although anti-SLAPP laws are helping to address this). With a TOS, the comeback is "You already agreed we could do what we wanted, so bye-bye, have a nice day."

Forum TOSes also include language about the person attesting to being over 13. This is to comply with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). This restricts websites and online services from collecting personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. Personal information includes names, email addresses, IP addresses, and even cookies. To avoid the burden of compliance, most forums simply set a rule of no users under 13, and spell it out in the TOS.

Unfortunately, these are real issues. When I was editor-in-chief of Harmony Central, there were frequent threats by people to file nuisance lawsuits. Thanks to the TOS, we could just tell them to go away.

 

[TonalDynamics]

The 1st Amendment says Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech, but this forum isn't Congress and can draw up whatever rules the moderators want to use regarding the ability of people to express themselves

Very double-edged sword, that.

One would argue that the virtual realm is the new 'public forum' and has been for some time, and I hold that position. As such I am a 'ToS minimalist' when it comes to protecting the rights of the people and limiting how much power companies can grab by setting their own terms, despite seeing why the need to delete posts and perform effective moderation duties is essential.

We have no supreme court rulings on this stuff after a quarter century of internet.

Tech moves at lightspeed while litigation moves at snailspeed, as AI clearly shows.

To be clear I am as sick of frivolous lawsuits as anyone -- to the point of believing fines should be levied upon the litigators if the case is thrown out -- but I believe there is a clear middle ground here between 'all-rights' and 'necessary rights'.

We simply need a ToS solution very similar to the cookies-mandate passed by the EU's GDPR which essentially everyone on the web complies with now. It would obtain user consent for the 'bare minimum' moderation rights established by the Admins, which would include post deletion, mandated edits, user bans, name changes, etc. etc., but without making some blanket-ToS claim to co-opting all creative copyrights from everything a user posts as it does now. If those rights are exceeded, there would have to be a CLEAR, separate consent notification, just like with cookies now.

Keep in mind, in theory, if Ed Sheeran somehow got his hands on his own masters, had his own music video recorded, posted them along with lyrics on Harmony Central or some forum with some boilerplate 'all-rights' ToS, the forum would have a 'legal basis' for posting and monetizing his video wherever they pleased... pretty sure I'm technically right about this, but feel free to present evidence to the contrary, I'm totally open to correction here.

Why doesn't that happen? Because Ed's handlers aren't scared of the legal fees that the site admins would inevitably flee from within minutes of the dozen C&D emails landing on their doorstep. Not that anyone is dumb enough to go around posting their own masters, but the power for abuse is there, and has historically been leveraged to abuse Joe-average users, particularly by shady admins on certain sites.

Thus we have a problem of unequal enforcement. The amount of power granted by the all-rights ToS meta as it stands would never hold up in a high-profile case, but because the average forum user is closer to Al Bundy than Ed Sheeran, creative ownership and user-rights are routinely abused. It simply flies low enough under the radar that no one has to admit that it's an abuse of title 17.

I think my A.C.C. analogy stands.

I just find it egregious that no website in particular, wherever/whatever it may be and whoever is running it, can supersede my country's civil rights protections to free expression with a copy-pasted EULA/ToS.

Again, totally open to civil discussion here, I just think boilerplate ToS is an open loophole in its current form, and there's clear precedent for reforming it. The GDPR essentially forced all nations to comply with CMP/Cookie-splash screen protocols, and if the legislation to reform ToS occurs in the US (fat chance), it would do the same. No one could afford the liability and it would lead to global compliance for a (somewhat) freer internet.


Appreciate your insights as always, Craig.

 

[Davey]

Fortunately, hardly anyone ever reads the TOS or the T&Cs.

As for the archive of the old forum I'd suggest putting it up on a separate site, perhaps one of the free forum hosting sites. I doubt there would be any legal problems but if there were then it's easy to take down.