Terms of Service Category

Fair Use and the ACM Copyright Licensing Agreement

Two years ago, in response to frequent requests for copyright advice around the time camera-ready papers for CHI or CSCW are due, I wrote a blog post explaining the ACM copyright license. At the end I included some notes about third-party material, but I’ve gotten some inquiries specifically about that and have also had to deal […]

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Reality and Perception of Copyright Terms of Service for Online Content Creation (CSCW 2016)

Do you understand the terms that you “click to agree” to when you post content on sites like Facebook, Craigslist, or DeviantART? It’s okay, neither does anyone else! But whether blog posts, photographs, or social media status updates, you own the copyright in your original content – which means that in order for one of […]

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LinkedIn Terms of Service: From one of the worst to one of the best

In the past year, I’ve been picking on LinkedIn a bit for the copyright licensing requirements in their Terms of Service. When talking about my work I routinely throw up a slide with this block of text as a visual demonstration of how unreadable TOS can be, and then explain worst case scenarios of what […]

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