Related link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35375.html
A friend passed me this Register story about Orkut’s user license, which looks a lot like a license Microsoft Passport tried to use but then discarded after another Register story stirred up user outrage about privacy and ownership.
I mentioned before that I saw no value in Orkut, and I think this little tidbit pushes that into negative value.
Would you give away your rights to meet people you already know?
Et Tu, Google?
My thoughts, if anyone is interested: Et Tu, Google?.
it gets worse
quote (from their TOS/license/whatever):
"We also reserve the right to modify these Terms of Service from time to time without notice. You are responsible for regularly reviewing these Terms of Service so that you will be apprised of any changes. "
In other words they could change their terms to something even worse and there'd be no way around them.
Phase 1 might be to claim exclusive commercial rights to anything you do, next step to claim ownership retroactively which is exactly what Yahoo tried when they took over Geocities.
That led to a huge walkout but if Orkut goes about it smartly with this clause they can prevent that from happening by simply refusing people the right to remove themselves...
Which ticked me off even worse (as it also affects non-members):
"When you invite new members into your network or send messages through the orkut.com service, we collect and maintain the information associated with those messages, including email addresses and content on secure servers. "
"Be advised that if you send messages or post material containing personal information, that information may be collected and used by others."
"We may share both personally identifiable information about you and aggregate usage information that we collect with Google Inc. and agents of orkut in accordance to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy. We will never rent, sell, or share your personal information with any third party for marketing purposes without your express permission. "
In other words they reserve themselves the right to use the email addresses and other data harvested from "invitations" the same way as they use the data of their 'members', including spamming...