vivian lim ⭐

thank you for all your work

thank you!

thank you!! really loving the site so far!!

thank you @staff

this's excellent. y'all might want to consider porting this update to twitter, since that's where a lot of the critique came from

based

giveashitism 👍

Thanks for all your work!!

thanks for making cohost

Good on yah folks 🦊☑

RIP @disney 😔

Thank you for these changes! That being said, I noticed that this part is still here:

You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services.

This is the bit that's been of most concern for my fanartist friends. Will there be another revision that clarifies that this doesn't mean "you may not post fanart?"

💅 we love to see it

what's the significance of the part in 6. User Content that mentions ASSC having a license to "prepare derivative works" from the User Content (i.e. the stuff we post here)? I notice it doesn't claim any rights to sell it, or ownership of the User Content, but what derivative works would ASSC be making from the User Content?

I still don't get what bullet point four means but the rest is a hell yeah moment!! ty staff

TYBG 🙌

I foresee the eventual need for an easy-to-remember URL or FAQ entry explaining how the alt policy relates to the existence of an API.

Thanks!

Thank you for listening to this feedback and improving the ToS.

thanks! this is much tighter and easier to understand now :)

thanks!

I know you have no intention to enforce things like this, but "you may not register under the name of another person" is still a confusing prohibition. Isn't almost everyone's name the name of another person? And is this going to cause people who read the terms to fear that cohost wants their "legal name" because legal terms are setting requirements on the names of people?

What "name" even is this referring to, given that you mention the username separately, and I don't think I ever had to provide a different name to cohost?

Loving the site so far and glad you guys communicate so often Nice to have a place while things implode on the bird side

Why the arbitration clause?

Thank you for such a speedy update to the issues brought up about the terms of service.

The person who made the initial thread highlighting issues in Cohost's TOS just made another thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1592972642465861633

She mentions in particular that the following big issues have not been addressed:

1. The binding arbitration clause;
2. The class action preclusion clause;
3. The tax indemnification clause and consent to arbitrary fee charging;
4. No purpose limitation on the rights grant clause

Is this update to the terms the first revision in response to these issues, with more to come?

nice updates! your reverse engineering note made me think of a suggestion for a future revision: "safe harbor" policies a la bug bounty programs at e.g. microsoft https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/bounty-safe-harbor for good faith security research.

i don't expect y'all to fund or administer an actual bug bounty rewards program, but these policies typically codify a waiting period before a reporter is allowed to publicize an issue which i bet you'd find appealing + the safe harbor and an intake process might attract some nerds who will bughunt just for fun or to help the site succeed

no longer chosting on a website with an abusive tos (thanks <3)

thank you i signed up under a false name, i am now legal

Can you please clarify if Kiwis are banned?

thank you! 💙

That's great!

party on & hell yeag

Thanks for your hard work staff! 🌟

I'm still concerned about this vague clause which gets no further clarification as to what counts as "commercial purpose":

You may not use the Services for any commercial purpose (except when transacting business with ASSC or with another User via the Services)

This feels extremely broad to me - "any commercial purpose" could be interpreted as, for instance, linking to a site where someone could buy an author's independently published work. I'm guessing this is not the intent, so it would definitely be good to clarify this.

Edit: Also possibly relevant to this - the "Defining Noncommercial" report from the folks at Creative Commons, which demonstrates that users have vastly different ideas of what "commercial use" entails: https://creativecommons.org/2009/09/14/defining-noncommercial-report-published/

Edit #2: There's also this related clause, which seems to override authors' decision on whether their own content may be commercially used (e.g., if they published content under a Creative Commons license without the noncommercial clause):

If you access, purchase, or subscribe to another User's User Content: (i) you may not use such User Content for any commercial purpose or for any unlawful or wrongful purpose; (ii) you agree not to rent, retransmit, disclose, publish, sell, assign, lease, sublicense, market or transfer the User Content or any portion of it or use it in any unauthorized manner

Disclaimer: I have no personal qualm with the TOS, but I'm seeing persistent shit-slinging from twitter.
The only thing that seems potentially bothersome to me is that in section 11, there isn't any specific clarification of users' specific rights of ownership to content they post, to distinguish it from, say, the stuff written and produced by ASSC as part of the site.

I think you should still specify EXPLICITLY and DIRECTLY rather than opaquely in your TOS that users are not surrendering their IP rights when they post to your site and that they retain them. It would also not hurt getting another, additional lawyer that has more knowledge and experience with IP rights. If the costs of the additional lawyer is prohibitive, I would suggest crowdfunding that session for the good of all those who want to see your service succeed. Your lawyer is trying and that's admirable but this TOS still falls short of both covering all your bases, being clear that no rights infringement is going to happen (or communicating that in an accessible way). Having read the new TOS, I have some notes (caveat, I am not a lawyer):

In section 6, User Content: "You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services. ASSC requires licenses from you for that User Content to operate the Services. By posting User Content on the Services, you grant ASSC a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display or prepare derivative works of your User Content."

It would be a good idea to add/clarify in this paragraph that posting to cohost does not transfer copyright or other IP rights beyond those in the stated license that cohost needs to post and host User Content. I understand that since "full transfer of rights" is not part of the license cohost says they need to host User Content that this is implied but a clarifying sentence to this fact would go a long way. This may also alleviate concerns raised by Section 11. It also would not hurt to define what derivative works cohost means here because there is an entire universe in those two words. [ETA: For instance, cohost could also specify what derivative works it will not make with User Content to assuage concerns.]

Re: Section "7. User Content License. If you make your User Content available to other Users, whether for free or on a purchase or subscription basis, you grant other Users a revocable, nontransferable, nonexclusive license to access, view information contained on, and interact with such User Content for the other User's personal, non-commercial use. If you access, purchase, or subscribe to another User's User Content: (i) you may not use such User Content for any commercial purpose or for any unlawful or wrongful purpose; (ii) you agree not to rent, retransmit, disclose, publish, sell, assign, lease, sublicense, market or transfer the User Content or any portion of it or use it in any unauthorized manner; and (iii) you agree to not copy, translate, port, modify or make derivative works of any portion of the User Content without the User's express permission."

The wording on this section is clunky and seems to imply that a User who is providing content to other Users on a subscription or purchase basis cannot offer commercial licensing options. Image, if you will, that someone is making fonts and they want to advertise them and sell them through your site. Say this hypothetical User wants to offer a "free to use commercially" font every month to their subscribers. Section 7 would seem to say that this situation is against TOS. If it is not against TOS for Users to be able to offer commercial rights to their own IP via the vehicle of subscription on cohost, this section needs to be clearer. If I may suggest an alternative edit:

If you access, purchase, or subscribe to another User's User Content: (i) you may not use such User Content for any unlawful or wrongful purpose; (ii) you may not use such User Content for any commercial purpose without the User's express permission; (iii) you agree not to rent, retransmit, disclose, publish, sell, assign, lease, sublicense, market or transfer the User Content or any portion of it or use it in any unauthorized manner; and (iv) you agree to not copy, translate, port, modify or make derivative works of any portion of the User Content without the User's express permission.

Here, I split the first item into two because a User cannot authorize someone to use their User Content in an unlawful way but a User should be able to authorize commercial use of their User Content as in the example provided above. Kept previous (ii) and made it (iii) because that bullet point also addresses how the User Content gained access to via subscription or purchase is used on and off the platform and seeks to deter any unauthorized use, whether unauthorized by the User providing User Content or cohost.

Additionally, as it stands, Section 5.e is hostile to trans individuals and is confusing about whether registering with a fictitious name (which most usernames are) is against TOS.

(e) choose a username for the purposes of deceiving or misleading our users and/or us as to your identity

My handle/username on here is plastic-red; as you can imagine, that is not my legal name. I do not plan to use my account for parody, which is what allows fictitious names on cohost as per the TOS at the moment [(d) except for the purposes of parody, [you agree not to] choose a username to impersonate another person (real or fictitious) or to pose as a representative of a person or entity when you are not]. As the TOS stands now, it is not clear that cohost is not expecting users to register with their legal names the way Facebook does and as you may intuit, this poses a problem for anyone in general that doesn't wish to make their handle or their display name their legal name. It is also hostile to trans individuals whose legal names could be their dead name and ones which no longer reflect their identity/themselves.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and fixes on this.

do y'all actually engage in dialogue on issues with your tos, or is it pointless to try?

pretty based so far. keep up the good work!

Hi, thanks for updating the Terms of Service, however, I feel it does not provide enough clarity with regards to ownership of material posted on the site.

Here's the problem: I still hear people say they don't trust Cohost because, essentially, the TOS gives ASSC ownership of everything we post on your site. Now, this might be false, and this post seems to reassure us that you will not claim ownership of our posts. However, when I read Section 11 of the TOS, I can't easily find anything that disproves their claim. Can you point me to the clause where we, not ASSC, are granted ownership of our posts?

'clarified that while it's against the Terms to sign up with multiple user accounts, cohost allows and encourages you to create multiple pages for all your projects and sideblogs under your account;' So this tells me having sideblogs here is fine, but I'm not finding anything on how a person can go about MAKING a sideblog. I make music, I write, and I'm starting to draw again, and I'd like to make separate sideblogs for each of these. If anyone can point me in the direction of how to make them, I'd really appreciate it