Who Knew?

Duncan Davidson writes about the specific ways in which you’re surrendering ownership of your submitted content by accepting Tumblr’s terms of service.

It’s almost certain that the intent here is to cover Tumblr’s ass with regard to content distribution and reblogging. The technical aspects of the Internet do make it hard to talk about copyright licenses as each step in the process of you viewing stuff online technically makes a copy. But, the way this is written makes it an axe that chops out too much for my taste. Without an explicit, “we’ll only use your stuff in these ways” clause, it becomes the typical American big-entity taking advantage of the little-guy legal document. Sure, the Tumblr folks that are in charge right now won’t use this against you. But, say evil big-corp buys Tumblr, what happens then? Oh, you’re content is theirs to use in anyway they want.

Sort of breaks my heart like Vimeo: they too have done a great job building a creative community (and just launched a feature called “Categories” to spotlight quality amateur videos), but their TOS is one of the worst among video-hosting sites.