Suggestions of Movement by Treemo on TOS

A little while ago I added Treemo to my list of Video sharing sites whose Terms and Conditions I forced myself to read for your benefit.

Well, Treemo’s Aaron Racine responded as so:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about our Terms and Conditions (T&C). Later on in the paragraph you’re quoting from, we say:

“You may terminate or restrict our rights to use your User Submissions by changing the rights granted on the permissions page of your account.???

and:

“The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the HyperBoy Website, however, HyperBoy does retain deleted works for up to 30 days for review.???

Our intent is to give content producers control over their content, and the (intended) spirit of the T&C is that “perpetual??? only exists while their content is 1) on our site and 2) publicly viewable (as determined by the producer). In case you haven’t looked beyond our T&C, we do allow producers to reserve all rights to their content, place it into the public domain, or select from one of six Creative Commons licenses. Additionally, we allow producers to limit the audience of any piece of content by allowing them to specify custom groups of community members that should have viewing permission.

We will look into making the “perpetual??? issue more clear in our T&C. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

and I had this to say in response;

Hello Aaron,
Thanks for your response- its great to see somebody answering these concerns. I signed up to your service to take a look around the options you outlined.
In reply to your comments below, I offer the following notes and observations:

Perpetual is forever. Not forever until something else happens. That would be the construction put on it in any legal forum.

Producers may reserve their rights in your settings, but those rights include the right to licence their content. As a licence agreement your terms and conditions as currently drafted trump any claims made in that setting.

The licence purports to terminate on removal and deletion- but once a ‘permanent’ licence has been granted, I’m afraid it would be a weak argument for a producer to rely on this termination clause.

Bottom line, while participation in Treemo is dependent on signing up to the terms of service as they’re currently drafted, I wouldn’t put up my work on it.

The final part of the exchange came by email. Aaron replied;

Thanks for the reply. I was definitely not the one that drafted the legal wording on our site =) I do, however, care if the T&C are not in line with our intent. Sounds like we shouldn’t have the word perpetual in there. We’ll have to consult with a lawyer (again). Thanks for the heads-up and for your time =)

We’ll be kind to their lawyer and check again in a month’s time to see if anything has changed.