Joel is unhappy about the terms and conditions a community site he was about to join imposed on him.

So I own the content, but they can do anything they want with it, even in forms that haven’t been invented yet. About the only concession that they grant to my ownership rights is that the license is non-exclusive. It says later that you can delete your profiles and that removes your content from the site, but they could still use it anywhere else, perpetually.

This is a hard one. I had to write a similar document for Life Times Voice back in the day, and you have a couple of conflicting issues.

First, if you want to maintain safe harbor under the DMCA, you need to be used just for communication. If you are taking copyright on the content, then you need to police it, and you’re responsible for any copyright infringement. If you don’t claim the copyright, you’re in the clear.

You need to balance that with the need to be able to reproduce it. The copyright owner has to give you explicit right to reproduce it. The rest of the clause is to protect you if you want to also use it in some unforseen format (podcasts of the best posts of the day, for example.)

I hope to be able to find a smart way to balance each of these needs in the new project. I want to do right by the customers (without crippling the business.)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.