Pinterest Updates Terms Of Service... And People Are Still Overreacting

from the but-of-course dept

I have to admit that I'm still at a loss over people freaking out over Pinterest. It's pretty much a non-issue, but it refuses to go away. I think I've finally figured out what's going on, however. Some copyright extremists are using Pinterest to try to whip people into a frenzy about nothing, such that they can use that against other sites later as well -- and, once they got going, Pinterest became a "proxy" for all other internet services and (by extension) computing itself.

Last Friday, for example, Pinterest updated its terms of service to clarify the parts where some people were very confused and freaking out. While they certainly didn't go to the lengths that Tumblr went to to make its terms of service "human" readable, the updates do clarify things. The key change, for example, was removing the word "sell" from the list of things that you grant a license to Pinterest over, as the company notes it never intended to sell anyone's content. I can pretty much guarantee how this happened. The lawyers who drafted the terms pulled the boilerplate list of rights you grant, and "sell" is always on that list. As we noted in the Tumblr TOS post, it's really just to give the company legal protection in case it sells something that has a tidbit of something someone uploaded. It's not that hard to come up with a scenario where that might happen. But overly paranoid folks turned this into some nefarious plan by Pinterest to get people to violate copyrights so it could sell the results.

But, as mentioned above, this isn't calming down the maximlaist extremists. The folks over at the "Artists' Bill of Rights" (which is not what it sounds like -- it's a front for copyright extremists, paying almost no attention to how artists actually create) are still very upset about Pinterest's terms of service and are interpreting everything in the most nefarious of ways.

The philosophy of their site is still to encourage members to copy content from other people or organisations' websites to the Pinterest website, then place the entire legal responsibility on their members for such copying.

Why? Because the PInterest business model has to start making money at some point. How can it do this? By monetising the content belonging to other people copied to it's website, possibly via advertising or affilliate programs, or in some other way. It may not be monetising that content overtly at present, but it must do so at some stage because it is gobbling up a lot of investors money to keep it afloat. As soon as it starts monetising the content the cat will be out of the bag and legal actions will commence. They are still in a period of grace - but for how long?

Horror of horrors. Pinterest is a service provider who would like to make money at same point -- just as the copyright maximalist artists would like to make money. Why is it evil when a service provider does it, but not when an artist does it? And, the fact is that Pinterest doesn't make any money at all if it's not useful. So, as you can expect, the folks at the Artist Bill of Rights want to guarantee Pinterest is not at all useful. For example, they attack the fact that Pinterest is now pointing people to ChillingEffects claiming that it's a site that is all about "protect[ing] the economic interests of the tech business model". Say what?! A site that highlights how copyright law is abused to stifle free speech and creativity is about protecting free speech and creativity. Anyone aiming to protects artists' rights should celebrate Chilling Effects.

The other complaint? That Pinterest isn't "pro-active" in monitoring the site for infringement:

We will continue to complain that Pinterest are NOT being pro-active in ensuring that copyright infringements are minimised.

And it's that line that highlights the reality. The folks hating on Pinterest aren't really worried about the law. Pinterest already goes well above and beyond what the law says they have to do. What they're complaining about is that the world isn't the way they want it to be. They're complaining that the world doesn't magically block copying. In other words, they're luddites who can't fathom why a world in which computers actually work is a good thing, and prefer to go back to a past where there were no computers. Computers copy. It's what they do. Tons of services have popped up over the years to let people do useful stuff, but much of that stuff only works because computers make copies. Making collections of photos -- all with links back to the original content, which has already been shown to drive significant traffic -- seems like it should be a good thing. Unless you hate computers and the fact that they copy.

The anger here isn't about Pinterest. It's about computers. They'd have as much luck telling the tide which way to go.

Filed Under: bill of rights, business models, computers, copies, copyright, luddites, terms of service
Companies: pinterest

Will Tumblr's New Terms Of Service Finally Lead To The De-Stupidifying Of Terms Of Service?

from the that-would-be-nice dept

Late last week there was some buzzing over Tumblr's new Terms of Service, which some noted had some amusingly plain language explanations in them, resulting in a bit of news coverage. Having gone through the process of creating terms of service with lawyers before, I'm somewhat jaded on the subject -- even though I thought we had pretty good lawyers who worked with us. The problem, however, is that terms of service, like contracts, are often defined by very specific things that have gone wrong in the past, and the lawyers make their money in trying to keep such things from going wrong in the future. Their job isn't to make your terms fun and friendly, but rather to protect you from getting into legal trouble. We had even suggested doing a "human readable" terms of service to go with the legalese and were warned not to do so -- as it could create problems later on if the human readable section and the legal section were somehow determined to disagree.

Tumblr has apparently decided to take that chance, and some of the quotes that are getting attention are actually from those "human readable" explanations. Such as this little tidbit:

You have to be at least 13 years old to use Tumblr. We're serious: it's a hard rule, based on U.S. federal and state legislation, even if you're 12.9 years old. If you're younger than 13, don't use Tumblr. Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books.

Thing is, that's not really in the "terms" itself, but in a call out explaining the actual terms, which are a bit more legal (though really not too bad). There are also other fun tidbits in the human readable explanations, like:

Don't do bad things to Tumblr or other users. Some particularly egregious examples of automated "bad things" are listed in this section.

One other nice thing in the human readable section deals with the part of most services terms that confuses the hell out of people and often leads to unnecessary freakouts is the license to the site, which is basically just saying you can't upload stuff to a site and then sue them for displaying it. People often misinterpret this clause such that they think it means you're giving the site your intellectual property rights and/or that they're going to go off and sell you stuff. Tumblr directly addresses this by first making it clear you retain rights to whatever, but then also saying:

When you upload your creations to Tumblr, you grant us a license to make that content available in the ways you'd expect from using our services (for example, via your blog, RSS, the Tumblr Dashboard, etc.). We never want to do anything with your content that surprises you.

Something else worth noting: Countless Tumblr blogs have gone on to spawn books, films, albums, brands, and more. We're thrilled to offer our support as a platform for our creators, and we'd never claim to be entitled to royalties or reimbursement for the success of what you've created. It's your work, and we're proud to be a part (however small) of what you accomplish.

It's definitely nice to explain this so clearly, since it's clearly a point where some people go completely crazy in misunderstanding what's being said.

Also, I note, with interest, that it appears that Tumblr has also removed the indemnification clause that is so standard in pretty much any terms of service. I think this is a good move. These things have become totally standard, but I'm curious if anyone can name a single time that an internet service provider invoked the indemnity clause when getting sued? What service provider would actually do that? It would almost certainly turn against them and freak out other users.

The press coverage is also highlighting a few other funny clauses... but those aren't actually in the terms of service, but rather the "community guidelines" which don't need to be nearly as legally relevant. I'll point out a few, but note that funny/human readable community guidelines really aren't that crazy an idea, but Tumblr's guidelines definitely are pretty good. A few amusing tidbits:

• Uploading Sexually Explicit Video. You can embed anything as long as it follows the other guidelines on this page. But please don't use Tumblr's Upload Video feature to host any sexually explicit videos. We're not in the business of profiting from adult-oriented videos and hosting this stuff is fucking expensive. You can use services like xHamster to host those instead.
• Impersonation, Stalking, or Harassment. Treat the community the way you'd like to be treated. Don't attempt to circumvent the Block feature. If you want to parody or ridicule a public figure (and who doesn't?), don't try to trick readers into thinking you are actually that public figure.
• Don't post content that violates anyone's privacy, including personally identifying or confidential information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, unlisted contact information, or private photos of your ex's junk (no matter how attractive).

Honestly, the coolest thing about Tumblr's terms of service is the fact that they've put it on github so you can really see the changes they made very easily, as the system highlights the difference, even for very minor changes. This is a really good idea, and one that it would be nice if other sites followed suit on.

That said, after seeing a couple stories about the new terms before reading them, I expected the terms to be a lot more human readable than they really were. This, once again, likely highlights my experience with lawyers five or so years ago when I went through this process. There really is only so much you can do. Still, this leads to two thoughts. First, just the fact that Tumblr is getting some attention for this makes me wonder if others will now strive for similar (or, better yet, great) simplicity in their terms and policies. That would be a nice and beneficial trend.

The second though is one I've brought up in the past as well: all this really does is highlight just how useless terms of service are in general. Even in a case like this where they're "more readable" most people aren't actually reading them or caring about them. And yet, for legal reasons, every site feels the need to have one (same with privacy policies). All these things really are designed to do is to provide legal coverage, but they do absolutely nothing to actually benefit users. When you have to do things to satisfy legal requirements which don't actually benefit users, it's a total waste of resources.

Filed Under: human readable, terms of service
Companies: tumblr

For Those Freaking Out Over Pinterest's Terms Of Service, Have You Stopped Using Every Other Internet Site Yet?

from the calm-down,-sparky dept

Last month we suggested that copyright holders stop freaking out over Pinterest. At the time, we noted there were two areas that people were panicking about: one was the terms of service and the other was whether or not Pinterest itself was violating the copyrights of images that are "pinned" by its users. We focused on the latter issue (and pointed out it was stupid) and breezed past the first issue by noting that the terms of service issue was silly, because the terms are mostly boilerplate language used by pretty much every online site.

Unfortunately, it appears that not everyone reads Techdirt (tragic, that) and the freakout has continued -- and it only seems to have grown over the past few weeks. We keep seeing more and more articles giving the terms of service issue attention. So many of the articles point back at a silly blog post by a lawyer describing how she "tearfully deleted" her Pinterest boards after reading the terms of service. For whatever reason, this story went viral, despite the fact that even the way she wrote it suggests this is one of her first forays into internet terms of service and copyright issues. She also notes in her post that "you have no right to reproduce this article or any portion thereof" which is a copyfraud statement, overclaiming rights. Yes, I do have the right to produce "portions thereof" in situations where it's fair use, and I will do so -- such as here, when I am commenting on her article.

Either way, her "tearful" post covers ground that's been covered many times before. This same issue comes up every so often when people read online terms of service for the first time. In the past we've seen similar freakouts about Twitpic, Google Plus and other sites as well.

Thankfully Nancy Sims, the copyright librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries, puts the smack down on the FUD that people are kicking up concerning Pinterest's indemnification, right to share and copyright license clauses. She notes that these elements are found in just about every user-generated content site's terms of service, and goes through the details of Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook and even her own University's terms of service:

Tumblr

Indemnity: "Subscriber will indemnify and hold Tumblr, its directors, officers and employees, harmless, including costs and attorneys' fees, from any claim or demand..."
Right to share: "Subscriber represents, warrants and agrees that it will not contribute any Subscriber Content that (a) infringes, violates or otherwise interferes with any copyright or trademark of another party [...] (c) infringes any intellectual property right of another or the privacy or publicity rights of another..."
License of copyrights: "...hereby grants and agrees to grant Tumblr a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable right and license (with the right to sublicense), to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works..."

Full Tumblr Terms of Service

YouTube

Indemnity: "...you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless YouTube, its parent corporation, officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees)..."
Right to share: "You affirm, represent, and warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to publish Content you submit.." AND "You further agree that Content you submit to the Service will not contain third party copyrighted material, or material that is subject to other third party proprietary rights, unless you have permission from the rightful owner of the material or you are otherwise legally entitled to post the material and to grant YouTube all of the license rights granted herein."
License of copyrights: "you license to YouTube all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to such Content for publication on the Service" AND
"you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content..."

(Not to mention points 9 and 10, in all their caps-locked glory.)

Full YouTube Terms of Service

Facebook

Indemnity: "If anyone brings a claim against us related to your actions, content or information on Facebook, you will indemnify and hold us harmless from and against all damages, losses, and expenses of any kind (including reasonable legal fees and costs) related to such claim."
Right to share: "You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else's rights or otherwise violates the law."
License of copyrights: "For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content) [...] you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License)."

(Props on their use of human-readable language!) 

Full Facebook Terms of Service 

And finally, from a user agreement for uploading content onto a server the University of Minnesota Libraries hosts! (Yes, I think these are reasonable terms of use, because I was involved in drafting them! (Although I'd still simplify the language a little.))

Indemnification (sort of): "I agree that I am solely responsible for the Content and for any consequences of uploading it to the [Server] and making it publicly available..."
Right to share: "I am the sole creator and the owner of the copyrights and all other rights in the Content; or without obtaining another's permission, I have the right to deposit the Content in the [Server]" AND "The Content does not infringe the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of another, nor does the Content violate any laws or another's rights of privacy or publicity. The Content is solely my original creation or if not, those portions that are not my creation are used with the copyright holder's express permission or as permitted by law."
License of copyrights: "I grant [...] the following non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide rights and licenses: to access, reproduce, distribute and publicly display the Content, in whole or in part, to secure, preserve and make it publicly available, and to make derivative works based upon the Content in order to migrate the Content to other media or formats, or to preserve its public access."

This kind of stuff is standard. Hell, even we've got some similar terms over at the Insight Community (and we had to fight with our lawyers to push back on some of them). All of these terms are pretty standard. They're basically meant to prevent the company from getting sued if you abuse the service, which is kind of silly since the companies are mostly protected by safe harbors anyway, and no tech startup would ever actually use one of these indemnity clauses against an ordinary user because they'd then lose every single other user they have.

I recommend people read the rest of Sims' article about all of this, as she notes that there's a tremendous amount of FUD making the rounds concerning Pinterest, which seems to be creating an unnecessary chilling effect against using the site.

Filed Under: copyright, indemnification, terms of service
Companies: facebook, pinterest, tumblr, youtube

Twitter Suspends Four Accounts Critical of Sarkozy: Is This What He Meant By 'Civilizing' The Net?

from the what's-going-on-here? dept

Nicolas Sarkozy, who hopes to be re-elected as French President this year, seems to have little love for the Internet. At best, he regards it as a "Wild West" that needs taming. Despite that, Sarkozy joined Twitter last week -- you can follow him @NicolasSarkozy. Posts are mainly written by his re-election team, although there seem to be a handful of personal tweets (marked "NS"). But at least he's finally engaging with the new medium on its own terms.

Or maybe not:

The morning after French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced he will run for a second term, several parodic Twitter accounts have mysteriously been suspended. @_nicolassarkozy , an account created in September 2010 and clearly labeled as a satirical Sarkozy impersonation, was suspended on Feburary 16th.

The account was run by the French website kaboul.fr:

According to Kaboul.fr, which, after complaining, received an answer from Twitter, @_nicolassarkozy was "suspended after being reported." Twitter also told Kabul.fr that to be granted such priviledge, the suspension had to be made by Sarkozy, or someone acting on his authority.

Twitter's official response has been leaked:

We have received a valid report that your account, @_NicolasSarkozy, is engaged in non-parody impersonation. Although Twitter firmly believes in the freedom of expression, impersonation that misleads, confuses, or deceives others is against the Twitter Rules (http://twitter.com/rules). Your account has been temporarily suspended due to violation of our impersonation policy.

The key issue here seems to be possible confusion, since Twitter's guidelines on Parody, Commentary, and Fan Accounts state:

In order to avoid impersonation, an account's profile information should make it clear that the creator of the account is not actually the same person or entity as the subject of the parody/commentary. Here are some suggestions for marking your account:

Username: The username should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as "not," "fake," or "fan."

Name: The profile name should not list the exact name of the subject without some other distinguishing word, such as "not," "fake," or "fan."

Maybe the account @_NicolasSarkozy has fallen foul of those rules, although it's hard to believe anyone would mistake a parody of Sarkozy for the real thing - it was not an "impersonation". But what about the other accounts that were suspended?

three other accounts, all clearly opposing Sarkozy's political views, were suspended at the same time: @mafranceforte, @fortefrance and @SarkozyCaSuffit. Those accounts where not related to Kaboul.fr, nor impersonating local politician, but straight-ahead, and recently-created, politically-oriented Twitter accounts.

"La France Forte" -- "Strong France" -- is the slogan for Sarkozy's campaign, prominently displayed on his Twitter page, so the use of the phrase for Twitter accounts might be seen as confusing. But again, the content would surely tip people off that it was a parody. The last of the four accounts that were suspended recently is @SarkozyCaSuffit -- roughly translated as "Sarkozy, That's Enough". It's clearly what Twitter calls a "Commentary" account, making a very obvious comment about a political figure - no question of "impersonation". Unless there are any other grounds for doing so (and so far there don't seem to be any), removing it looks like pure political censorship in favor of Sarkozy.

We don't know at this stage exactly who asked for these four accounts to be removed, only that according to Twitter's rules it must have been done "by Sarkozy, or someone acting on his authority". We asked Twitter about this and it refused to provide specifics on why the accounts were closed or the timing, other than to say that just because the accounts were suspended in the same general time frame, it wasn't necessarily for the same reason.

Be that as it may, the near-simultaneous closure of four accounts all critical of a powerful national politician inevitably reminds us that for many countries, "civilizing" the Internet often comes down to censoring it. It's worrying to see France apparently starting to go down that route -- and for Twitter to be helping it.

Update @_NicolasSarkozy has been unblocked, but the other three are still suspended.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: france, free speech, nicolas sarkozy, satire, terms of service, twitter
Companies: twitter

DOJ Two Step: It Should Be A Criminal Offense To Lie About Your Age On Facebook... But We Probably Won't Go After You For It

from the well,-that's-comforting dept

While we obviously spent a lot of time on the SOPA hearings this week, there was another Judiciary Committee meeting of interest this week concerning cybersecurity. Part of the discussion focused on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is being regularly abused by law enforcement to bring all sorts of questionable charges against people. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why we fear the felony provisions in SOPA, because we know how the DOJ abuses similar laws.

In this case, one of the key issues is that law enforcement has used the law in the past to say that any violation of a terms of service agreement -- such as lying about your age when signing up for a dating site -- could be a criminal offense under the CFAA. That, of course, is insane. Even more ridiculous, however, is that the DOJ's official testimony at the hearing was about how important it was to keep this part of the law in place, allowing it to add questionable charges.

The law must allow "prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider," -- Richard Downing, Justice Department's deputy computer crime chief

But then, Downing also seems to be saying the exact opposite:

“The DoJ is in no way interested in bringing cases against people who lie about their age on dating sites, or anything of the sort. We don’t have the time or resources to do that,”

So.... the law must allow such prosecutions, but it has no interest in bringing such prosecutions. That makes perfect sense. If you're a DOJ official, I guess. For the rest of us... huh?

Filed Under: cfaa, doj, felony, hacking, lying, orin kerr, richard downing, terms of service

Judge Orders Divorcing Couple To Swap Facebook And Dating Site Passwords, Breaking Facebook's Own Rules

from the this-makes-no-sense dept

This is a bit odd. Apparently, a judge has ordered a divorcing couple to share each other's Facebook and dating site passwords with each other, as part of the discovery process for the divorce proceedings. As Kash Hill at Forbes notes in writing about this (link above):

In “normal” discovery, a litigant is usually asked to turn over “responsive material” not the keys to access all that material and more...

I honestly can't figure out why that "normal" route wouldn't make sense here. Why require full access to each others' accounts? As Hill also notes, this certainly violates Facebook's terms of service, and it seems odd that a judge would require users to violate the terms of service. It also seems strange since having such access can lead to additional mayhem as well. Beyond just accessing all sorts of content that may not even be relevant for the case, what happens if one of them contacts someone else using the other's account. It just seems to go way beyond what makes sense.

Filed Under: divorce, passwords, terms of service

Senate Committee Recognizes That Violating Terms of Service Shouldn't Be A Crime

from the now-let's-get-this-through dept

As we recently noted in our coverage of the various attempts to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), with some plans to make it worse, there was one bright spot: Senators Grassley and Franken had introduced an amendment that would make it clear that merely violating a website's terms of service did not constitute exceeding authorized access, as some law enforcement (and courts) had interpreted the law to read. Thankfully, this amendment was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's no guarantee that it will become a part of the law -- and there's no guarantee that other changes might not make the CFAA even worse, but it's at least a step in the right direction. It's good to finally see Congress at least push back on the expansive interpretation of the CFAA that law enforcement has been using for too long.

Filed Under: al franken, cfaa, chuck grassley, terms of service

Congress Debating If Putting A Fake Name On Facebook Should Be A Felony

from the how-to-turn-the-whole-world-into-felons dept

On Wednesday, George Washington Law professor and former federal prosecutor Orin Kerr authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, posing the question "Should faking a name on Facebook be a felony?" He was, of course, talking about the infamous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which Congress is preparing to update. The CFAA, as has been noted here many times, is a federal law passed in the '80s and initially designed to combat malicious computer hacking, but which has become bloated, stretched and over-applied in the years since.

At the root of many of the arguably overreaching applications of the CFAA is the prohibition on conduct which "exceeds authorized access" to a computer system. According to Kerr:

The problem is that a lot of routine computer use can exceed "authorized access." Courts are still struggling to interpret this language. But the Justice Department believes that it applies incredibly broadly to include "terms of use" violations and breaches of workplace computer-use policies.

Breaching an agreement or ignoring your boss might be bad. But should it be a federal crime just because it involves a computer? If interpreted this way, the law gives computer owners the power to criminalize any computer use they don't like.

And Professor Kerr should know, he was the attorney who defended Lori Drew when she was charged with a felony for making a fake MySpace profile. The Justice Department's position that a violation of a terms of service constitutes a federal crime basically makes the Federal government the enforcer of private contracts. Got an employee spending too much time on Facebook? Turn them in to the Feds. Someone posting comments you just don't like on your blog? Call the DOJ. Or threaten to. The chilling effect alone should be enough to keep your users in line.

Would you believe that some politicians are even thinking of making the bill even worse?

Professor Kerr's primary concern expressed in the op-ed was that the CFAA was going to be amended to make any violation of the CFAA a felony. Hopefully, this won't pan out. The original Administration proposal (pdf) did increase the baseline punishment for any violation of the CFAA (including exceeding authorized access) from a misdemeanor level offense (less than one year) to a felony. But, thankfully, the Judiciary Committee didn't take the Administration's suggestion. Lets hope it stays that way as this bill makes its epic journey through the Washington legislative sausage maker.

There is yet a glimmer of rational-thought hope. Senators Grassley and Franken have introduced an amendment (pdf) which would modify the definition of "exceeds authorized access" to exclude violations of a TOS, if that's the only basis for the charge of violating the CFAA, effectively improving the CFAA instead of making it worse. Fingers crossed that the amendment makes it in.

Filed Under: cfaa, felony, hacking, orin kerr, terms of service

Thou Shalt Not Sue Sony

from the can't-let-people-have-rights dept

AC alerts us to a change in the new Sony PlayStation Network terms of service that basically says that you agree not to sue the company. Honestly (and Sony pointed this out in its defense), such clauses are pretty common. It is debatable how enforceable some of these clauses are, but they say that you have to go to arbitration, rather than sue. The terms also bar participating in class action lawsuits, which seems much more questionable. Where Sony gets ridiculous is in claiming that this change "is designed to benefit both the consumer and the company by ensuring that there is adequate time and procedures to resolve disputes." That makes me think of a two syllable word whose first four letters are bull. Come on. At this point, everyone knows that binding arbitration between a company and a consumer wildly favors companies. A study from a few years back found that companies win in arbitration against consumers 95% of the time. Sony knows this. So its move is not about protecting consumers at all, and it's insulting for it to imply that it is.

Filed Under: arbitration, playstation, playstation network, psn, terms of service
Companies: sony

Guy Suing Google For $500 Billion, Now Suing Microsoft For The Same Amount

from the either/or dept

Last week, we wrote about David Stebbins legal filing in which he claimed that Google owed him $500 billion, and that the whole thing could not be contested. This wasn't a first. As we noted, earlier in the year he demanded $600 billion from Walmart. Eric Goldman lets us know that Stebbins is also demanding $500 billion from Microsoft, using basically the identical legal "theory" (and we use that term loosely) as he did with Google. That is, he "amended" the Xbox contract, sent it to Microsoft, telling the company that if it didn't cancel his account it meant it had agreed to the contract. When his account wasn't canceled he demanded arbitration over a random issue, pointing to the clauses in his amended contract, including a promise to respond to arbitration requests in 24 hours. Microsoft, of course, did not. Once again, he pointed to the clause in his contract that "claimed" such a forfeit means an automatic victory in arbitration at an amount declared by Stebbins. He then goes to court to "enforce" this supposedly incontestable arbitration "win."

Like most of his previous lawsuits, this one will likely get tossed, in part because nothing in the terms for Xbox (or YouTube, with the Google lawsuit) say that the customer can unilaterally change the contract, contrary to Stebbins' claims. It'll also get tossed out because it's ridiculous.

When we wrote about the Google claim, a few folks in the comments pointed out, accurately, that Stebbins' efforts, while crazy, do point out the ridiculousness of one-sided clickthrough agreements, and the fact that most companies reserve the right to unilaterally change them, and that you "accept" those changes by doing nothing. In fact, in an interview with SeattlePI (the main link above), Stebbins seems to suggest that's part of his motivation:

“My true goal is not to just harass, and it’s not just to get rich. My true goal is to level the playing field.

“I’m trying to give employees, consumers, and generally, people who’ve been economically disadvantaged a new, powerful tool to protect themselves. Who needs to go crying to Congress for more workers’ rights and consumer protection laws?! We can do it all ourselves! How’s that for a motive you can get behind?!”

If that's his reasoning, it's likely to fail on that intention as well, as these lawsuits won't actually work and will get tossed (and sooner or later he may end up in a bit of trouble for filing bogus lawsuits). It's one thing to point out bogus legal terms. It's another to abuse the court system to try to make a point (and on the "lottery ticket" hail mary pass that some court might award you $500 billion).

Filed Under: arbitration, david stebbins, terms of service
Companies: google, microsoft