TOS Update #2

[qilin]

Preface

We have some really difficult topics to work through today, so I hope you bear with me, and discuss the issues that concern you in the comments.

Harassment Occurring on Other Sites

Sometimes, harassment issues between two Dreamwidth users aren't taking place on Dreamwidth itself, but outside of it on other sites. Unfortunately, we cannot take action on this for a variety of reasons. For one, we can't actually affect content or behavior or other sites. For another, we don't have the same tools on other sites as we do here, making such a policy very easy to game. The TOS policies do not have any clauses for such actions taken outside of Dreamwidth.

Dissemination of Locked Content

As strange as it may seem, there actually isn't anything in the TOS against this, either.

There's this clause:

IX. No Resale of Services

You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell, or exploit any portion of the Website, use of the Website, or access to the Website.

But it's not about spreading around locked posts; it has to do with charging people to access their journals or redistributing the site's trademarks. All other relevant clauses in the TOS have to do with things that members do on the Dreamwidth website.

It's a very tricky issue fraught with feelings of violation but not many solutions. Like all content you give other people access to, such as emails or letters, the person can turn around and abuse the privilege by redistribution. But, unless it's happening on the Dreamwidth site, there's not much we can do about it.

TOS Team Response Times

Our goal is for a response within 24 hours. All members of the team have jobs or kids or other responsibilities that can interfere with immediate responses. What's more, many cases at this point are new situations that don't have routines or precedents set yet. They require us to talk to each other and confer on a course of action and policy. This can take time.

Staying in Appropriate Channels

The TOS section of the Support boards is the main place to make your case; you should open up a support ticket for your needs. We are notified when a new TOS support request is made. You can also email abuse@dreamwidth.org--this will automatically create a ticket in the TOS section of Support, which makes it a good choice if you're having trouble accessing the site itself.

Please do not personally message mark or denise about your case--they are aware of it, so emailing them personally does not help. Keeping your request in the right place makes sure that we have the appropriate logging and tracking for it, as well as allowing your issue to be looked at by whoever is currently available.

Paid Account Refunds

The TOS says that "Payments to Dreamwidth Studios, for account services or for any other purpose, are refundable or transferable solely at Dreamwidth's discretion." There's a lot of factors that go into that decision; for instance, the length of time from payment (as PayPal will penalize refunds given after a certain period of time) or how much of the service people have been using. For instance, seed accounts are now well past the point where we can refund them without penalties. It's possible that we will instead offer alternatives to a refund, such as transferring the paid account status to another account.

If you don't trust giving us money over the long term but would still like the benefits of a paid account, we do have shorter term periods of paid time available in segments as small as 1 month, and six month premium paid account periods. They can cost slightly more, to make up for the greater proportion of the PayPal fee to the payment, but we don't make more money off of them.

Suspending OpenID accounts

We've had a couple people request that we suspend their OpenID accounts for various reasons--we haven't because we want this instead to be a technical ability (as far as I am aware, called "permascreened") instead of something done through hackish procedures like suspending OpenID accounts.

Keeping an eye on policy changes

Unfortunately, it looks like dw_tos_feed isn't working right now--the Mercurial software uses an encoding that gives our syndication system errors. However, you are still able to watch it with another RSS reader; some browsers even have RSS feed reading capabilities built in, like Firefox's live bookmarks. I also would like to point out there is a feed for privacy policy changes.

Comments

[mark]

I think that, in theory, that's a good idea. But in practice, I'm not sure it is. In short: If you look around, you can find people violating the GPL everywhere you go. They don't care about the license, and people don't care enough to sue them to force them to comply.

For Dreamwidth, I don't see a tangible difference in having it or not. Would you want to be on a service where the management is only doing what you think is correct because of some document that forces their hand? No, you'd probably move on to some other service, because there's no sense in staying where you disagree with the philosophy of the ownership.

We do have some safeguards in the LLC's operating agreement (legal contract about how the company is run) to prevent selling out, and to force a majority of profits to be used for the community, etc), but in the end, I believe a site like this comes down to the user's trust in the operators.

Either people trust us (based on our actions and statements) to uphold the things we have said and published, or they don't. And in the end, the way we've structured the business plan (paid accounts, no advertising/sponsorships/etc) dictates that we need to be what our customers demand of us. If we fail you, if we take this site in a direction you aren't happy with, then I hope people will vote with their wallets. "We don't like that, and we won't support it."

Of course, I also hope you'll give us adequate notice so we can fix the problem, first. :-)

Some people don't trust us yet, and that's fine. We're relatively new, all things considered. But check back every few months, watch what people are saying, and in the end I believe that we will come to earn people's respect, and hopefully, their business.

What do you think?

[scruloose]

You certainly raise a couple of interesting and valid points. Yes, the GPL gets violated all the time, and many offenders are never pursued. Of course, it's better to have GPL protection than not have it, and some offenders do get sued and end up forced into compliance (eg the Linksys firmware/dd-wrt scenario). It seems clear that if there weren't some threat of consequences, many more people and companies would be ripping off open source code than currently are.

And no, you're quite right that I wouldn't want to be on a service where the management is only doing what I (or the userbase in general) think is right because they're forced to. I think you're quite right that trust plays a big role in the whole relationship. Now, I mentioned in my previous comment, I'm pretty jaded. Trust doesn't come all that naturally to me, and less so in what's fundamentally a business relationship. (In my experience, things have a way of changing when money's on the line--and the more money, the more marked the changes tend to be.) That being said, I definitely want to point out that everything I see so far inclines me to be very pleased with the attitudes of Dreamwidth's management. My trust is extremely hard to earn, but so far so good!

But! In business relationships, there's a constant balancing act between trust and enforceable contracts. The contract has an important role in that it makes the expectations and obligations clear and has some implication that there can be consequences if obligations aren't met. Trust has a vital role in that--contract or no contract--you don't want to get into any relationship with someone who's going to twist the wording of the contract beyond all reasonable interpretation to meet their own ends, or just blatantly ignore it and dare you to sue them.

And the balance definitely shifts significantly from trust to reliance on the contract in the case of the venture being sold someday. Having a clear anti-censorship covenant built right into the terms would send a signal to a potential buyer that if they exercise editorial control over users' content, they're going to be violating their contract and taking a risk (if slight) that some coalition of users could sue them and win. It would presumably tend to discourage buyers who have that in mind (though they might choose to take the risk in the end).

For my part, I trust Dreamwidth about as much as I can imagine trusting a business venture that I've only had a few months' contact with; and I can confidently assure you that if things start going in directions I'm not okay with, I'll certainly complain and try to get things corrected before I just bail out.

All in all though, I still see a valid and potentially important role for having that trust backed up by a clear and unambiguous covenant which provides some incentive (or enforcement mechanism) to stay on the right path if and when the temptation comes up to go wrong. Even the most trusting business relationship has some element of a balance of power.