Ever actually read a website’s Terms and Conditions statement? If you have, or if you have some idea of what one contains, you might agree that, dammit, it’s time we set some terms of our own! A lot has changed since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was signed into law protecting Web services that control access to copyrighted content. Increasingly, that content – and its associated profits – is being created by us. So webmasters, here are our Terms and Conditions:

We maintain this connection to the Web (“Individual Connection”) and collectively to all websites contained thereon (“You the Web”) for the purposes of communication, information, education, and watching Hulu. Please feel free to study our use of the Web for the purpose of enhancing our experience online by creating content to better inform us and to better waste our time. When permitted, You the Web may place cookies on our browsers in order to improve our search experiences or to facilitate our interactions with friends, friends of friends, followers or contacts. You the Web agree to clean up the crumbs.

You the Web may use information you collect from this Individual Connection for your own use. You may not, however, distribute, modify, transmit, reuse, report, or share in any way with third parties information You the Web collect from the Individual Connection without a written request delivered with great fanfare and presented to us in very large font and in our native language, which is not legalese. We must agree to your request by clicking first an “I Agree” button and then an “Are your Sure?” button and then a final button that links to the page where we may download a free app.

Your access and monitoring of the Individual Connection is also subject to the following terms and conditions (“Terms and Conditions”) and all applicable laws, including any laws we have made up and shared with, and that have been generally accepted by, our 500 million or so friends of friends of friends on Facebook.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

1. ACCURACY Information presented by the Individual Connection is provided to You the Web on an “as-is” basis. We make no warranties or representations, express or implied, as to its accuracy, particularly with regard to Photoshopped profile images, white lies included among our Likes and Interests, or any vicissitudes in our behavior that are a particular result of how You the Web use our information. We may no longer be who you think we think we are.

2. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY You the Web should assume that everything you see or read that has been generated by this Individual Connection is copyrighted or subject to trademark protection, unless otherwise noted, even if we forgot the little symbol. Nothing produced by the Individual Connection should be construed as granting, by implication, estoppel, or otherwise, any license or right to use any intellectual property displayed by the Individual Connection, regardless of how unintellectual, idiotic, dumb, inane, preposterous or plebeian it may appear, without the written permission of the Individual Connection, which, even at 140 characters or less, would itself be intellectual property.

3. USER’S RISK Your access or monitoring of the Individual Connection is at your risk. Neither the Individual Connection nor any other party involved in creating, producing, or delivering information to You the Web from the Individual Connection is liable for any direct, incidental, consequential, indirect, or punitive damages arising out of your inability to create an application or website that we can’t game. The benefit to both parties from the information You the Web collect from the Individual Connection will have a direct relationship to your ability to collect that information, and You the Web risk reducing that mutual benefit, particularly now that your Captcha phrases are becoming too hard for even humans to read.

4. LICENSE In consideration of the age of sharing, by displaying to the Individual Connection content of any kind, including, but not limited to, text, photos, or other data or materials (“Materials”), You the Web hereby grant to the Individual Connection a fully transferable, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free understanding that the Individual Connection shall endeavor to copy, steal, pilfer, modify, display, distribute, and otherwise use and exploit all such Materials in any form of media, software or technology of any kind that exists today or that will exist in the future unless otherwise agreed to in a signed written document with the Individual Connection. Your Terms and Conditions don’t count because the font is too small and because, while we may have agreed to that fragmented portion of your Terms and Conditions that appeared in a 250 x 250 pixel popup window with a flashing “I Agree” button underneath, we didn’t physically sign it.

5. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES While monitoring or studying the Individual Connection, You the Web may not: 1) post or transmit junk mail, spam, or any other type of unsolicited mail unless the offers contained in such unsolicited mail are genuine and really will make us rich online in six day days or less; 2) transmit or otherwise distribute information constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense without the expressed guarantee that such information shall provide the thrill of a lifetime; 3) stream or transmit Materials that are pornographic or sexually explicit in any way while our significant other is in the room; 4) transmit or use any information or software which contains a virus, robot, cancelbot, spider, trojan horse, worm or other harmful or disruptive component or insect, especially if you are McAfee, Norton or AVG.

6. USER’S REMEDY If You the Web are dissatisfied with the Individual Connection or with any terms, conditions, rules, policies, guidelines, or practices of the Individual Connection, your sole and exclusive remedy is to go out of business.

7. REVISION OF TERMS The Individual Connection may at any time revise these Terms and Conditions by updating this posting. You the Web are bound by any such revisions and should therefore periodically visit this page to review the then current Terms and Conditions to which You the Web are bound.

{ 0 comments }