[Deestan]

I think it's very simple: If they truly believed they would never stoop to those "downright villainous things", they would not need to allow for them in the TOS.

Putting the promise in the actual TOS is much more believable than putting it in a blog post.

[LnxPrgr3]

From the link:

"The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question."

I think they deserve a little patience and a chance to follow through with their promise. When they do, we can see how villainous the terms still are. And if they don't keep their promise, we can call them on it.

[mstefanko]

Not sure why people think they deserve more of a chance to explain themselves. Even after they already tried. They knew what they were doing when the changed the TOS. It wasn't an overnight decision. They did not take any real blame for the stupid decision to change it. It came off as more of a, i'm sorry you misunderstood, than an i'm sorry we did this. There is a good chance there intentions were not bad, but it was a very poor decision on their part to jump to this level. They are not back peddling hard enough in my useless opinion. I don't think consumers owe it to companies to hear them out. This isn't a tiny app developer who made a mistake in legalese. A team of lawyers just tried to eat our free lunch. Even if their intentions were not evil, if it disagreed with the users, they have a right to walk away.

[onedev]

If only the law worked that way.

Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.

[lsc]

>Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.

Note, getting angry? that is what changes this sort of thing.

Seriously, setting up a ToS is a pain in the ass. If someone that understands the business and the customer isn't involved, if you throw it over the fence to the lawyers, and you don't read it like a user would, this is what it ends up looking like. Hammering out a good ToS is really hard, and it requires effort of someone that cares about the reputation of the company, /and/ hasn't drank so much company kool-aide that they understand that users don't always assume good faith.

These people are harder to find than lawyers. So yeah, setting up a good ToS is hard.

If customers just 'click through' and don't care what the ToS says? guess what businesses are going to do? we are going to throw it over the fence to the lawyers, who are going to write something like this, if they think the VC is their client.

Getting angry is really important, because it's the only way to convince companies to put the effort in to writing a good ToS.

[Karunamon]

You mean how the ToS of Flickr, Picasa, etc don't include such terms?

[ProblemFactory]

Picasa Terms of Service are much more limited.

They ask for a license to store, display and publish your content, but this is explicitly limited to the use of operating the service. They need that license so that some user does not sue them for copyright infringement after uploading their own pictures and clicking "share".

Instagram/Facebook take a much broader license, which includes sub-licensing rights to third parties, including for profit and unrelated to the operation of Instagram itself.