American blogger Amy Gahran, owner of the blog Contentious, has discovered clauses in the newly revised AOL contract for its "free" instant messenger service (AIM) that claims "compilation and derivative rights" to all content and ideas discussed or entered on the service. AOL's right is "irrevocable and in perpetuity". You now also waive the right to privacy in using the service.
If bloggers like Amy want to be considered journalists they should try actually investigating the issue before being so Contentious.
If she'd done that, she'd have found that:
1) The terms of service are not newly revised, they date back to February of 2004.
2) They refer to posts on AIM's public message boards.
3) AIM's privacy policy explicitly states "AOL does not read your private online communications when you use any of the communication tools offered as AIM Products."
Granted, the word "post" is used in a somewhat vague manner, but again a journalist, or at least someone who was interested in actually reporting as opposed to drumming up FUD, would have contacted AOL while researching the issue.
I was also embarassed by the Slashdot posting on this issue last weekend. The Slashdot authors simply posted a quote from someone who was regurgitating one of the hundreds of bloggers who were going nuts over this non-issue. After a few hundred comments from the Slashdot community lambasting AOL and spelling out doomsday scenarios (and of course discussing how GAIM suffers from bloat), someone finally had the brains to read the document in question.
-- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
