The biggest lie on the internet

Terms of Service Didn’t Read (ToS;DR) is a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E. Terms of Service agreements have become a kind of Faustian Bargin where most people often too lazy to read the massive amounts of text (For instance, Facebook’s terms of service is longer than the U.S. Constitution) happily click and agree. Buried in non-human friendly language users often grant away rights as well as usage of personal data in exchange for access to a site and / or service.

Copyright in real-time

This post from BusinessWeek touches on some interesting issues regarding copyright and the emerging realities of a real-time web.

Copyright law wasn’t written with today’s content consumption in mind. The way online video copyright functions is based on a reading of the 10-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act that equates video hosting sites with Internet service providers. That law provides a “safe harbor” for hosts who respond to copyright claims by taking down infringing content “expeditiously.”

There doesn’t seem to be widespread motivation to modernize that process. Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion , claiming YouTube should take more responsibility than the current reading of DMCA requires — but that’s plodding along in the courts . Meanwhile, Internet users are sharing and consuming content at a furious rate. And what’s being called the “real-time web” is even less equipped to deal with copyright infringement. READ MORE