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appdotnet / terms-of-service

The App.net terms of service documents live here. To facilitate transparent discussion, we encourage users to create issues and/or submit pull requests with your feedback. Our general process is to incorporate user feedback on a roughly quarterly basis based on review with our legal team, but in the early stages this may occur significantly more often.
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Permission to link should allow commercial purposes and images #15

Open mattflaschen opened 12 years ago

mattflaschen commented 12 years ago

https://github.com/appdotnet/terms-of-service/blob/master/terms.md#hyperlinks-and-third-party-content says, "You may create a text hyperlink to the Service for noncommercial purposes."

It is controversial and jurisdiction-dependent whether permission is required to link. See http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter6/6-c.html#1 and http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2002/06/53355 .

If you want to explicitly grant permission (perhaps because of the few jurisdictions Stanford mentions that may require it), there should not be a noncommercial qualifier.

It is neither acceptable nor desirable to block linking by most search engines, most newspapers, and a large segment of blogs. All of those are commercial, and linking is part of their commercial purpose (information finding and dissemination)

JoshBlake commented 12 years ago

I don't think it is even valid to suggest that hyperlinks can be categorized into commercial or non-commercial purposes. A hyperlink is just a hyperlink. Commercial activity requires an evaluation on a much higher level.

For example, it would not make sense to say "you may not breath the air in this room for commercial purposes". Breathing is breathing. Maybe you're doing an activity that is commercial in nature (sales call) which requires the utility of your body and your body needs to breath, but evaluating breathing is the wrong level of abstraction.

Another example would be limiting the use of a specific road to only non-commercial traffic. There's so much gray area that it's impossible. Maybe I'm driving on the road in order go to a store to pick up supplies for my bakery and buy flowers from the shop next door for my mother.

@mattflaschen Agree with explicit permission for legal reasons but without a modifier.

mattflaschen commented 12 years ago

Also, image hyperlinks to app.net should be allowed as long as the anchor image does not infringe an app.net copyright or trademark. As is "text hyperlink" is overly limiting.