UK WiFi Company Uses Overlong TOS To Trick Hotspot Users Into Cleaning Toilets, Hugging Stray Cats

from the sign-your-life-away dept

So we've talked for years about how overlong terms of service contracts that nobody reads are used to eliminate your rights in numerous ways. That includes stripping away your legal rights and forcing you to engage in binding arbitration, which results in the company-employed arbitrator ruling in their employer's favor a vast majority of the time. In fact Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, recently cited these overlong and misleading contracts as one of the biggest threats to the health and utility of his invention.

Every so often we'll see a company conduct an experiment to demonstrate the stupidity of long-normalized behavior, like the company in 2010 that got users to sign off on selling their soul. Taking a cue out of that playbook, UK WiFi hotspot operator Purple recently did something similar, burying a provision in their terms of service requiring that customers engage in 1,000 hours of menial labor if they wanted to access the internet.

Purple currently provides hotspot connectivity to Legoland, Outback Steakhouse and Pizza Express, and stated in a blog post that they provided patrons with a wonderful array of possibilities in terms of how to pay down their community service time, including:

The company says it ultimately found that over 22,000 users blindly signed off on the requirement during the two week period during which the experiment was conducted. It should go without saying that they won't be enforcing the rules, but wanted to simply get a little free press while highlighting the stupidity of overlong TOS. Impressively, they note that during the two-week trial, just one user actually noticed what he was signing off on:

"Don’t worry, we aren’t going to round up these individuals and ask them to don their rubber gloves and repay the community debt. The real reason behind our experiment is to highlight the lack of consumer awareness when signing up to use free WiFi. All users were given the chance to flag up the questionable clause in return for a prize, but remarkably only one individual, which is 0.000045% of all WiFi users throughout the whole two-weeks, managed to spot it."

While these pranks go a long way in highlighting the problem, there's few if any real efforts to actually do much of anything about it. We desperately need simpler, cleaner terms of service updated for the digital age, but since companies adore using these lengthy, confusing contracts to protect themselves, hamstring your product ownership rights and make additional revenue, nothing much ever changes.

Filed Under: hotspots, terms of service, tos, uk, wifi
Companies: purple

AFP Back To Claiming That Twitter's Terms Of Service Allow It To Take And Sell Anyone's Twitpic Photos

from the they-can't-be-serious dept

Two years ago, we wrote about one of the most bizarre copyright lawsuits we've ever heard of. News giant AFP (Agence France Presse) -- for reasons that I still cannot begin to comprehend -- decided to proactively sue a photographer, Daniel Morel, after it (AFP) had taken his photos (of the earthquake in Haiti) from TwitPic without permission, and distributed them for sale via Getty Images. So why did AFP sue? Because Morel contacted them upon discovering this, demanding lots of money. And what was AFP's reasoning? Well, it tried to claim that Twitter's terms of service allowed this. There were all sorts of problems with that idea. First of all, the photo was on Twitpic, not Twitter, and the two are different companies. But, more importantly, neither of the terms of service from Twitter nor Twitpic (AFP eventually figured out the difference) allowed AFP to do what it claims. The AFP appeared to deliberately misinterpret the terms of service, which simply give Twitpic the right to make use of the images -- but that does not extend to third parties automatically, which is what AFP implied.

Oh, and did we mention that AFP itself has a history of copyright maximalism, including suing Google for merely linking to AFP stories, with AFP's headline showing in Google News?

And, while a judge eviscerated AFP's claims about TwitPic's license, it appears that AFP is back to relying on that as the crux of its legal argument.

And, it gets even worse. During discovery, Morel seems to have received a bunch of pretty damning evidence from AFP suggesting that the company knew all along what it was doing. There was the fact that AFP's director of photography for North and South America reached out to Morel prior to downloading the images. The same guy apparently copies other images from other sites. Multiple people seemed to suggest from the very beginning that they shouldn't use these photos -- including the Director of Photography at Getty, who pointed out that Morel regularly used rival photo agency Corbis. There was also some other damning evidence, including editing the copyright management info, and uploading the image under multiple names, and only issuing a kill notice on one name.

Oh yeah, and then there was the fact that someone inside the AFP sent an email saying:

Anyway, AFP got caught with a hand in the cookie jar and will have to pay.

And this was before AFP decided to sue Morel. Perhaps the company should have just paid up in the first place.

Filed Under: licensing, photography, tos
Companies: afp, getty images, twitpic, twitter

Court Says Sony Is Free To Change Its Terms Of Service Because Accessing PSN Is A Choice

from the companies-own-you dept

Last year, Sony changed its terms of service for accessing the PlayStation Network. Like many other companies, part of the changed terms was a requirement to take disputes to arbitration, rather than court. These clauses are pretty popular for some obvious reasons: the companies almost always win (perhaps because the arbitrator wants to get hired in the future, and implicitly recognizes the big company is likely to call him again -- not the random individual who has a dispute with the big company). On top of that, it's a lot cheaper than litigation. That part is a good thing, but arbitration hearings seem to be so one-sided that they're often not worth it.

Some folks were not at all happy about this and sought to file a class action lawsuit against Sony for the change -- but that lawsuit has been (pretty quickly) rejected by the court, suggesting that the main guy suing failed to show evidence of any harm. In an interesting move, the court found that the fact that you lost access to the network if you didn't agree to the new terms isn't evidence of any harm, but rather a choice. Of course, that seems a bit extreme. It opens up possibilities for companies to more or less corner users into unpleasant situations. Just change the terms and anyone can be excluded.

I'm not a fan of mandatory arbitration clauses or class action lawsuits like this where "harm" is pretty tough to show. In the end, though, it does seem like Sony should be able to choose and change its terms of service. The real issue is that it chose consumer-unfriendly options, and in a better world, less draconian alternatives would spring up to help treat consumers right. It's hard to side with Sony here (or in most situations), but the lawsuit itself does seem like a stretch.

Filed Under: arbitration, playstation, psn, tos
Companies: sony