Category: Uncategorized

“Terms of Service; Didn’t Read”

As you use different websites, you might not be asking yourself any questions like: “Who owns this content?” or “Can I actually delete my profile?” or “Will they report this data to the government without my consent or knowledge or a subpoena?” Thankfully, a team of volunteers at “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” is looking into this for you.

Many of us go through websites and just click through the terms of service agreements with only passably reading the words. For some websites where we do not have to create a log-in (like Songza or Grammarly) we may never read the terms of service at all. “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (TOSDR) is an all-volunteer crowdsourced database that evaluates the terms of service of various websites. Currently, TOSDR has evaluated about 70 of the major websites with new ones being added all the time.

Not only can you look up at a specific website in their ever-growing database, you can also download a browser extension for the following browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. The TOSDR Microsoft Explorer extension is still being developed. The extension works like this: After installation, you go to a website. If a website is in the TOSDR database an icon will appear in the upper right part of the screen inside of the browser, which will give the rating of the Terms of Service.

The rating will be a letter grade from “Class A” (very good) to a “Class E” (very bad) or a question mark, if TOSDR has not assigned a website a letter grade. From there, you can click on the grade, and TOSDR will also tell you what is good or bad about the website’s terms of service. Currently, these extensions do not work on mobile devices, although Opera is currently developing their operating system so the computer-based extensions will work on mobile devices.

As more and more libraries develop digital content and may start requiring logins, the website gives 24 topics for websites to consider when creating their own Terms of Service for online platforms. While there is no boiler-plate language, it does give preferred contractual positions for a user-focused Terms of Service agreement.

If you have strong opinions about the terms of service of a website, you can always submit content or review of a website’s terms of service, with the instructions available here: http://tosdr.org/get-involved.html or join their working group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/tosdr

 

Image: A Map of a Part of the World © Anne Gilliland, 1979.

Today’s #TarGramChallenge is #CampusAbstract, and so we are considering the many abstract paintings in my office.  I first became interested in copyright when I was an art student in college.  I thought it was very interesting that I could own a copyright just by affixing notice (the copyright symbol, name, and date) to my work.  This was the law at the time, but today the rules have changed yet again, and now no formalities are needed to obtain a copyright.

Did you know that U.S. copyright law gives some special rights to visual artists?  The Visual Artists’ Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) grants some moral rights to creators of some types visual art, primarily fine art prepared for exhibition purposes.  For the purposes of the VARA, these moral rights are

• the right to be recognized as the author of a work
• the right to prevent attribution for work s/he did not create
• the right to prevent attribution if a work has been modified in a way that prejudices the creator’s honor or reputation,
• the right to prevent the destruction of a work of “recognized stature”

In this country, these rights can be waived but not transferred.  And the rights are distinct from ownership of the copyright and ownership of the physical object.  Moral rights are more common and apply to more types of works of authorship in Europe than they do in the United States.

I created the painting reproduced above prior to 1990.  Do I have moral rights in the painting?  Yes, I would, if I transfer title of the painting to someone else.

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe he does have a copyright interest . . .

UK based photographer David Slater’s infamous “monkey selfie” has a complicated jurisdictional history. The monkey took the photograph in Indonesia, where Slater set the scene for the photograph. Slater has a contract with UK based Caters News Agency, and Caters published the photograph online. Then, US based Wikipedia and parent organization Wikimedia posted the photograph online to an American domain site: Wiki Commons. If Slater were to go to court, he seemingly could have a choice of two different areas of law: American or British.

There has been a lot of speculation already on American copyright law, because the legal community has assumed that American law would apply. The general consensus has been that American law would not allow a copyright, because the photographer is the monkey, and American law does not recognize a right of an animal to hold a copyright.

Most people do not seem to realize that Wikimedia also has a registered non-profit in the United Kingdom, so Slater could probably sue that division under the laws of the United Kingdom. If the United Kingdom’s international choice of law rules follows the American choice of law rules, it is likely that the copyright law of the United Kingdom would govern as it is a citizen of the United Kingdom suing a non-profit incorporated under the laws of the United Kingdom. We don’t know whether a person in the United Kingdom can view the image in the UK on Wiki Commons website, because here in the Scholarly Communications Office, we don’t have access to an Emulator to see what the Internet looks like in London. Presuming that a person can access the image in Wiki Commons from London, the law of the UK would apply. The law of authorship there states “In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.” In this case, Slater may be that person, and UK law would determine that. What makes this case more interesting is that if American legal scholars are correct, then the monkey selfie would be in the public domain in the United States but protected under copyright law in the United Kingdom. It will be interesting to see how Wikimedia responds, as copyright law only covers national boundaries but the Internet is multinational.