View Topic

The Wintreath Terms of Service have been updated. The updated ToS are below, and continuing to post on this forum will constitute acceptance of the changes. There is one addition to the ToS, which is bolded below.

You agree, through your use of this forum, that you will not post any material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise in violation of any International or United States Federal law. You also agree not to post any copyrighted material unless you own the copyright or you have written consent from the owner of the copyrighted material. Spam, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are also forbidden on this forum. By submitting content, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free, perpetual, non-revocable license to use or distribute such content, and to authorize others to do so.

Note that it is impossible for the staff or the owners of this forum to confirm the validity of posts. Please remember that we do not actively monitor the posted messages, and as such, are not responsible for the content contained within. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented. The posted messages express the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of this forum, its staff, its subsidiaries, or this forum's owner. Anyone who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to notify an administrator or moderator of this forum immediately. The staff and the owner of this forum reserve the right to remove objectionable content, within a reasonable time frame, if they determine that removal is necessary. This is a manual process, however, please realize that they may not be able to remove or edit particular messages immediately. This policy applies to member profile information as well.

You remain solely responsible for the content of your posted messages. Furthermore, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless the owners of this forum, any related websites to this forum, its staff, and its subsidiaries. The owners of this forum also reserve the right to reveal your identity (or any other related information collected on this service) in the event of a formal complaint or legal action arising from any situation caused by your use of this forum.

You have the ability, as you register, to choose your username. We advise that you keep the name appropriate. With this user account you are about to register, you agree to never give your password out to another person except an administrator, for your protection and for validity reasons. You also agree to NEVER use another person's account for any reason.  We also HIGHLY recommend you use a complex and unique password for your account, to prevent account theft.

After you register and login to this forum, you will be able to fill out a detailed profile. It is your responsibility to present clean and accurate information. Any information the forum owner or staff determines to be inaccurate or vulgar in nature will be removed, with or without prior notice. Appropriate sanctions may be applicable.

Please note that with each post, your IP address is recorded, in the event that you need to be banned from this forum or your ISP contacted. This will only happen in the event of a major violation of this agreement.

Also note that the software places a cookie, a text file containing bits of information (such as your username and password), in your browser's cache. This is ONLY used to keep you logged in/out. The software does not collect or send any other form of information to your computer.

To address concerns from our writer community about the previous update, we have made a second update. Again, continuing to post on this forum will constitute acceptance of the changes. Additions are bolded in the new version below:

You agree, through your use of this forum, that you will not post any material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane,  threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise in violation of any International or United States Federal law. You also agree not to post any copyrighted material unless you own the copyright or you have written consent from the owner of the copyrighted material. Spam, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are also forbidden on this forum. By submitting content, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free, perpetual, non-revocable license to use, modify, distribute, and/or produce derivative works of such content, and to authorize others to do so, for the limited purposes of displaying your content and allowing our users to interact with it.

Note that it is impossible for the staff or the owners of this forum to confirm the validity of posts. Please remember that we do not actively monitor the posted messages, and as such, are not responsible for the content contained within. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented. The posted messages express the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of this forum, its staff, its subsidiaries, or this forum's owner. Anyone who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to notify an administrator or moderator of this forum immediately. The staff and the owner of this forum reserve the right to remove objectionable content, within a reasonable time frame, if they determine that removal is necessary. This is a manual process, however, please realize that they may not be able to remove or edit particular messages immediately. This policy applies to member profile information as well.

You remain solely responsible for the content of your posted messages. Furthermore, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless the owners of this forum, any related websites to this forum, its staff, and its subsidiaries. The owners of this forum also reserve the right to reveal your identity (or any other related information collected on this service) in the event of a formal complaint or legal action arising from any situation caused by your use of this forum.

You have the ability, as you register, to choose your username. We advise that you keep the name appropriate. With this user account you are about to register, you agree to never give your password out to another person except an administrator, for your protection and for validity reasons. You also agree to NEVER use another person's account for any reason.  We also HIGHLY recommend you use a complex and unique password for your account, to prevent account theft.

After you register and login to this forum, you will be able to fill out a detailed profile. It is your responsibility to present clean and accurate information. Any information the forum owner or staff determines to be inaccurate or vulgar in nature will be removed, with or without prior notice. Appropriate sanctions may be applicable.

Please note that with each post, your IP address is recorded, in the event that you need to be banned from this forum or your ISP contacted. This will only happen in the event of a major violation of this agreement.

Also note that the software places a cookie, a text file containing bits of information (such as your username and password), in your browser's cache. This is ONLY used to keep you logged in/out. The software does not collect or send any other form of information to your computer.

There seems to be some confusion over what this terms of service change entails, with some people on the Discord suggesting that it essentially makes everything on Wintreath public domain, or that it basically surrenders property rights of content to Wintreath. That's quite untrue; the user retains copyright on anything they produce, and is essentially just giving Wintreath the right to display any content that has been submitted to the site. It's a common CYA measure for websites (such as YouTube, Instagram, Google Drive, Wordpress.com, etc.) to make sure they can do what they normally do without running the risk of getting sued.

Here's the lead reddit admin explaining similar changes that were implemented to reddit user agreement in 2013:

Ah yes! 

The key here is that when you post something to a website, we need the right to display that content.  The act of displaying it constitutes "reproducing" your work, and many of the actions (thumbnailing, quoting for previews or summaries, etc) may constitute preparing derivative works.

You end up seeing this claim everywhere and it is packed with pretty intimidating legal terms so I want to parse it down. The individual components mean this:

• royalty-free: we don't have to pay you to display the post/comment that you posted on reddit.
• perpetual: the right to display what you posted doesn't disappear after some specified time.
• irrevocable: once you posted it, you can't just say "hey wait, no, you can't display that."  (In practice though, we allow you to delete it, but in case we do not successfully delete it or remove it fast enough, we wouldn't want there to be legal liability associated with that)
• non-exclusive: THIS IS IMPORTANT - non-exclusive means that you retain the rights to what you posted, i.e. you can still publish it elsewhere, and you own the copyright.  We are just claiming a license to display it in addition to your own rights.  This is something that has come up a lot - people often wonder when we claim such a wordy and broad license to their contributions whether they still retain rights to it: you absolutely do.  You can take your own stuff and make it into a book, or republish it on your website, or anything you want.  We just retain a non-exclusive license to be able to display the content you wrote on reddit.
• unrestricted, worldwide: these rights aren't restricted to e.g. the United States, because anyone in the world might use reddit, so we need to be able to do that in any country.
• derivative works, copies, publicly display: as noted in another comment, thumbnails are derivative works, but e.g. we might make a shirt with some popular meme derived originally from a funny comment or something (e.g. "send photo").
• authorizing others to do so: we may need to pass the content through any number of service providers in the course of doing business.  The biggest one is CDNs, who redistribute/cache our content through edge networks to servers closer to you in order to reduce latency and load on our origin servers.

(Do note that reddit's license is much broader than Wintreath's. While ours only gives the rights solely for the purposes of displaying and interacting with the content, reddit's allows them to use the content for any purpose, including commercial ones.)

That said, for those in the writing community, there are certainly concerns over losing first publication rights and such (though to be fair, if you store the content anywhere online, you run that risk). But otherwise, I see little cause for concern.