In the Register, an interesting piece on Orkut's terms of service, which danah previously criticized, and Cory described here as "craptacular":
Orkut's terms of service harbor a nasty payload —
"By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials." — It's startlingly similar to the Microsoft Passport Terms which caused a storm of outrage two years ago, a reader points out. (…) Microsoft was forced to amend [its] terms five days after our first story, amidst threats of defections.
I don't imagine that the folks behind Orkut are evil people, and I wonder what their response is to the Reg article — and to concerns voiced by present and former Orkut members. In a similar flap, users publicly lambasted phonecam-blog service Textamerica last December over a draconian TOS; to their credit, Textamerica modified it promptly.
Link (via The Unofficial Google Weblog, and thanks, Cole!)
BoingBoing reader Michael J. Madison, a professor at Pitt, says "take a look at this post on my blog about RSS v. Atom as XML standards for feeds. I haven't seen anyone else in the techlaw/policy blogosphere pick up on this, but the possible Google/MS parallel is interesting. "
