Follow up on scary legal stuff...

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vanilla-vanilla's avatar
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For what it's worth, here is a follow-up on "scary legal stuff" from J D Sawyer. First, about the Dropbox Situation.

:-)

I rather like this guy's blog, and it seems worth following if you're interested in security and/or legal issues with "cloud computing": You are not the customer you are the product

He argues that you -- the artist, musician, writer -- who uses a "free" cloud service is not the customer, but the product. The customers are their advertisers or demographics collectors, people who are using your data as a product payload to push their advertising agenda.

If you're doing anything serious with large amounts of data, such as selling your art, books, or music, you'll probably be best off with a service you pay for. So, he pointed to this nice article from ECTimes... TOS Comparison .

And now, students: homework! It's time for you to go look at the DA terms of service, to make sure you understand them: about.deviantart.com/policy/se… particularly sections 4 and 16. Again, you'll see you're giving DA non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content. Blah blah blah. Of course DA prefixes that with For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service. (You probably realize that resizing JPEG images to provide thumbnails, for example, is a form of preparing derivative work; so you can see why they need that ability.) To me, the terms seem reasonable, and the artist seems reasonably protected. In some of those other services you see phrases like sublicensable, perpetual, and non-revocable -- none of which DA claims. So far...
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erosarts's avatar
I have always lived by the motto, if it's valuable in any way, don't put it on the internet. I think the amount of fraud and theft happening in electric-land might even take up more cyber-space than the porn now.