Monday, March 14, 2005

AIM Update -- 8:30 am CST, Update by The Master

AOL has commented on the furor raised over the AIM TOS changes made last week. You can see the follow-up on eWEEK. America Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein had the following to say:

Such language is standard in almost all similar user agreements, including those from Microsoft and most online news publications. That clause simply lets the user know that content they post in a public area can be seen by other users and can be used by the owner of the site for other purposes . . . AIM user-to-user communication has been and will remain private"

While this makes me feel a lot better about the whole situation, it disturbs me that this type of language is becoming acceptable at a large ISP. What this seems to state is that anything you post into a "public" location on AOL does not have copyright protections from AOL or any AOL affiliate. If you write a utility, copyright it, and put it up on a website hosted by AOL, then AOL can repackage your program and sell it themselves (a "derivative work") and there's nothing you can do about it. I hope I'm wrong on this assumption.

A.T. Hun comments: While they may offer that as an explanation for the EULA, that is certainly not what it says. What Qbe said yesterday is true. Assume that everybody and their monkey can read anything that you post online or send via email or IM.

News for 03/14/2005

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