Have You Really Read Your ISP's TOS?

NewtonsLaw writes "XTRA, New Zealand's largest ISP is in the process of losing customers in droves after it announced its new Terms of Service which seek to claim rights over customers intellectual property (see the Slashdot discussion). Now, if that wasn't enough, Aardvark Daily reports that the ISP is also banning its users from saying bad things (anything 'detrimental to our reputation or to our brand') about it. I wonder how many slashdotters have actually read their own ISPs' terms of service in detail? Is this type of IP-grab and clampdown on free speech is unique to Xtra or is it slowly pervading the whole industry, right across the globe?" Read on for Xtra's amendments to the original IP-grab terms, though.

Reader THX1138 points out that "After the very recent story on Xtra (New Zealand's version of AOL) they changed the IP section to include 'Xtra does not claim ownership of any content or material you provide or make available through the Services. However...' at the start and 'in each case for the limited purposes for which you provided or made the Customer Materials available or to enable us and our suppliers to provide the Services.' at the end."

Comments

giving up common carrier status

[PD]

If they give up common carrier status and start controlling and owning everything on their network, does this mean that if terrorist sites or kiddie porn appear on their network, their CEO and board of directors will be habeas corpused off to Cuba? Or whatever the equivalent thing that New Zealand does to people they don't like.

In Breach

[mvdw]

Before today, I'd only given the TOS a cursory glance, and I found that I am regularly in breach of a couple of the terms:

1. "You must not maintain or permit multiple concurrent connections to the Internet Access." - I connect through a smoothwall firewall, which is connected to several computers, quite often two of these are in use concurrently;
2. "never recording Your password on Your computer, and safely storing Your password"; - The password is stored on the smoothwall (encrypted, but still), so that anyone that knows the smoothwall password can access the internet... contrary to TOS above, it seems ;-)

I don't really care too much, though, because it's only a dial-up connection, so the connection is inherently throttled...

Atlanta ISP changes

[Lord Bitman]

ISPs change-hands so often here, it's hard to keep up. When my ISP spontaneously became Comcast one month, I asked them to send me a new TOS. They said that their TOS was the same as AT&T's, but have refused to provide them. Am I bound to something they won't give me?

Post each others' sites

[PhilHibbs]

If I upload someone else's data, I have no right to grant the ISP the rights that they claim, therefore they don't have those rights. What I'm unsure about, however, is whether their terms of service prohibit me from posting material that I do not have the right to grant rights over. If so, then I probably can't post any GPL'd software. Let's look.

Hmmm, this is interesting:

You agree that all content, software, personal identifiers (including addresses) and anything else we make available to you in connection with our Services (together "Works") are protected by copyright, trade marks and other intellectual property rights and laws.

So no posting Project Gutenberg texts, then. Taken literally, anything I post has to be trademarked.

You warrant that you will not:

• license, assign, otherwise transfer, make available or grant any interest in any part of the Works to any other person

So, no GPL'd software that I wrote then, but presumably other peoples' GPL'd software is ok.

Xtra does not claim ownership of any content or material you provide or make available through the Services ("Customer Material"). However, by placing any Customer Material on our Websites or Systems (including posting messages, uploading files, importing data or engaging in any other form of communication), you grant to Xtra a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide licence to do the following in respect of the Customer Materials:

• use, copy, sublicence, redistribute, adapt, transmit, publish, delete, edit and/or broadcast, publicly perform or display, and
• sublicence to any third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the rights granted,

in each case for the limited purposes for which you provided or made the Customer Materials available or to enable us and our suppliers to provide the Services.

Seems reasonable, they need the right to distribute the data, they might want to keep an archive, and they might want to sell that archive as an asset. Note the limiting nature of the last paragraph.

IMO, there's nothing sinister here, although the first section I quoted is just incompetently written.

Legal hacking

[NoBlock]

Just read the TOS for my ISP again and was reminded why I chose this ISP (even though it is not the cheapest available). One of the clauses says (roughly translated):

All customers are allowed to hack the system. The first custormer that manages to get 'root' status will receive 6 months free use of the system. In return customer will explain how the system was hacked. Customers will take pains not to damage the system. Customers hereby give other customers to hack the system.

I feel that this should be a standard clause in any ISP's TOS.