Rather than being a contract that affects what the usercan do, this revises the Terms of Service to become a description of what the agencywill do. In fact, it's no longer titled "Terms of Service" (besides the filename of tos.md).
It also goes out of its way to state that use of the API is unlimited and unrestricted.
This positively changes the relationship between citizens and their government to an open and respectful one. Additionally, by changing the document from a contract to a description also seriously lessens the pressure on the language to be precise, defensive, and militarized.
Even with that lessened pressure, I'm sure the language needs further work. But we should be able to do better than requiring a Serious Contract for citizens to make use of public government information.
When it comes to the US government, API terms of service should never be used to control citizen use, and API keys should never serve as a lever for anything but analytics collection, and abuse enforcement.
It seems like there's a few tracks to this issue, so I'm moving the vanilla language that you're replacing over here and will rename this file after merging in your version.
Also spinning up a readme to help organize the conversation further.
gbinal
commented
10 years ago
Rather than being a contract that affects what the user can do, this revises the Terms of Service to become a description of what the agency will do. In fact, it's no longer titled "Terms of Service" (besides the filename of
tos.md).It also goes out of its way to state that use of the API is unlimited and unrestricted.
This positively changes the relationship between citizens and their government to an open and respectful one. Additionally, by changing the document from a contract to a description also seriously lessens the pressure on the language to be precise, defensive, and militarized.
Even with that lessened pressure, I'm sure the language needs further work. But we should be able to do better than requiring a Serious Contract for citizens to make use of public government information.
When it comes to the US government, API terms of service should never be used to control citizen use, and API keys should never serve as a lever for anything but analytics collection, and abuse enforcement.