There Are Some Super Shady Things In Oculus Rift's Terms of Service (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: While the [Oculus Rift] is cool, like any interesting gadget, it's worth looking through the Terms of Service, because there are some worrisome things included. Quite a few of the items in the document are pretty typical in any sort of Terms of Service agreement. These include details like waiving your right to a juried trial and agreeing to go into arbitration instead. Oculus can also terminate your service for myriad reasons, and third parties can collect information on you. However, there are some even more devilish details in the Rift's full Terms of Service. If you create something with the Rift, the Terms of Service say that you surrender all rights to that work and that Oculus can use it whenever it wants, for whatever purposes. Basically, if you create something using the device, Oculus can't own it, but the company can use it -- and they don't have to pay you for for using it. Oculus can use it even if you don't agree with its use. Oculus can collect data from you while you're using the device. Furthermore, the information that they collect can be used to directly market products to you. As UploadVR noted, the Oculus Rift is a device that is always on (much like Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect feature) which leads to further concerns about when the information will be collected.

Comments

Re:Pretty standard boilerplate...

[Mashiki]

Some stuff that people(including the law itself) will likely have problems with: The irrevocable, perpetual, and non-exclusive and transferable stuff. Depending on where you live, this would be all contract clause statements. And stuff that can not be used in a EULA because it's considered "a waive of rights, protected by law."

Re:Pretty standard boilerplate...

[SharpFang]

Actually, any reasonable firm qualifies the above with a limitation of application: "for the purposes of providing the service, marketing and promotion of the service" - so they can e.g. include clips/screenshots of your work in their promo materials.

Any license which omits this specific limitation is dodgy, because while they *explain* it's for "transmitting the content", in fact they reserve the rights in extreme excess of what is necessary for operation.

It's like firefighters reserved the right to enter your house at any time, at will, for whatever purpose, how often and how long they desire, and with ability to sublicense this right to any third party. And explained they need it to save you if your house is on fire.