The thread by the Dreamwidth person, specifically. (Archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20221208033334/https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1588764577650692096.)
Disclaimer: I am not yet a practicing lawyer. I am not certified to practice in my own jurisdiction, let alone yours. This post is not legal advice.
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Class action waiver/arbitration clause: not exactly universal practice for websites, but for a website that's explicitly running on a not-for-profit basis, I'm not sure they can afford to not do that. They already can't afford enough hours out of their lawyers to get a more readable ToS written, so. It's not a particularly good thing to be putting in a ToS, but I get it, from a company that can't just throw arbitrary amounts of money at settling something before a class action gets certified.
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"may not use the services for a commercial purpose": at this point, they've not banned so many freelance artists and authors that no court would ever let them enforce that clause in that way. Contractual interpretation is, to varying degrees, based on prior practice by each party within the contract. Also, enforcing like such would just kill the site, so… …they practically never would.
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the "reverse engineering" bit: it's been removed from the ToS, but once again, in the context of a ToS for a website, that's an untenable interpretation that would get anyone alleging it laughed out of court. As the mere act of using a website requires copying its HTML locally, that's going to constrain what those terms practically mean to things like trying to run a clone of the site.
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the "you warrant… …accurate" part: in practice, this just means "don't even try to sue us if we ban you for posting far right conspiracy theory content". Once again — would anyone actually stay on the site if they started banning people for getting facts wrong in essays, or even posting blatant disinformation for comedic effect? Broad ToSes like this are a measure to limit legal liability, not an actual indicator of how the site will be run. Furthermore, "§230" isn't a thing in every single country that isn't the US, and more substantively, not every country has an equivalent liability shield for websites. Some of those countries also regard arbitration clauses and class action waivers as unenforceable, so they're protecting themselves from getting sued in jurisdictions where their other layers of defense don't exist.
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"register under one username": you can have multiple pages running from one account. This complaint is an outright, complete and total lie.
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"notify us… …unauthorized access": I'm not sure if this part is even helpful at all, TBH?
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the parts about names: they've modified it somewhat since, but the suggestion that a website where ¾ of the staff and owners are trans would ban people for not using their legal names is absolutely astonishing. A contract's terms need to be interpreted with reference to who might seek to enforce them. Additionally, almost every account on there is pseudonymous, including the entirety of the staff, IIRC. Absolutely zero chance they could ever argue that No, Actually, The Contract Means Pseudonyms Are Banned.
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the "infringe others' copyright" part: once again, there's tons of non-parody fanart being posted on there, and the admins have never taken any action against it. It'd probably kill their site if they attempted to retroactively change their interpretation of that clause in terms of alienating users, and if they tried to enforce it in court, once again, it probably wouldn't hold up well.
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"…provide support": removed.
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"…data repository": removed.
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"…must own all rights": see above.
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"…perpetual… …irrevocable": any way in which they could hypothetically actually abuse this would probably bankrupt them just from the resulting litigation. In practice, deleting the content would achieve the effect of revocation.
The archived version of the thread ends here, but I remember this thread also referring to a section that "gave them copyright over your works", and: no. The "Content and Ownership" clause starts with "Except as otherwise expressly indicated herein".
What might be indicated otherwise? The license they require for "User Content" (note the defined term with capitals; they're signalling that this is a Very Specific Thing).
So, basically, they're saying that they have total copyright over… … …literally the part of the site that they made which isn't user-generated content. They still require a license for User Content, because you do not need to license a thing that you already own.
