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Has any one noticed the terms of service for KB lately? (MERGED)

113K views 895 replies 185 participants last post by  Tobias Roote 
#1 ·
You agree to grant to KBOARDS.COM a non exclusive, royalty free, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, transmit, sublicense, create derivative works of, publicly display, publish and perform any materials and other information you submit to any public areas, chat rooms, bulletin boards, newsgroups or forums of KBOARDS.COM or which you provide by email or any other means to KBOARDS.COM and in any media now known or hereafter developed. Further, you grant to KBOARDS.COM the right to use your name and or user name in connection with the submitted materials and other information as well as in connection with all advertising, marketing and promotional material related thereto, together with use on any other VerticalScope Inc. web sites. You agree that you shall have no recourse against VerticalScope Inc. for any alleged or actual infringement or misappropriation of any proprietary right in your communications to KBOARDS.COM.
I normally don't think of stuff like this as bothersome, but I know some of you use your author names as your usernames, and you could find your words used to promote this site on other vertical scope websites.

Unless I'm reading this wrong.

Anyway, not sure it's a problem, but you know how it goes. Someone's nice today and a bear tomorrow.
 
#777 ·
Good points Twisted Tales....not being an author I am not nearly as upset as some and I'm not sure how much of the drama is that most TOS sound very bad when you actually read them. VS has been around for awhile and I'm not sure yet that I've seen evidence that they actually steal peoples work and make derivative novels from them even if it could technically be ok per the TOS
 
#778 ·
I'd like to point out that after many pages of abject chaos, not a single practicing attorney has stepped in to explain where I was wrong when I pointed out a copyright transfer requires a written instrument and a signature under U.S. law.

You know, it's not a mistake the word "authorize" is derived from the word "author." United States law is as clear as a bell on this matter, and any contract, web-based or otherwise, that purports to claim someone else's intellectual property in contravention of 17 U.S.C. 204 is not enforceable. Leaving aside our manuscripts and posts, there is also the Lanham Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanham_Act

--which is the primary law that governs trademarks in the U.S. Many of us have significant trademark protection even if we haven't yet registered our marks. We are also a signatory to the Berne Convention and so is Canada, so our copyrights are enforceable in over 100 nations.

Perhaps the new TOS is boilerplate language meant to protect the company's right to publish the forum itself. Perhaps not. But ultimately there is not only a list of statues but a body of case law that almost always leans in favor of rights holders for obvious reasons. Copyright, trademark, patent, trade dress, et al. were considered important enough by the framers to include in Congress' constitutional enumerated powers. This nation has taken intellectual property seriously ever since, and the results speak for themselves. The entire self-publishing industry was made possible by our well-established and well-protected two-centuries-old concept of copyright. It is one of several equalizing forces in this economy, and it is rather unlikely to be overturned by a unilateral change in the TOS on a web site.

All that said, I will leave the invitation open for the time being for any member of the Bar in any state to point out where my plain text readings of the statues above are flawed. In the meantime, I'll reserve judgment on whether I should look elsewhere for a writer's forum.
 
#779 ·
Pandorra said:
My issue is this, if we are posting asking about signatures, covers, blurbs, snippets, income or many other topics where the older authors have been generous in sharing examples of their own work in order to assist new authors, how comfortable are they going to be now in any discussion involving those things? The answer is not at all comfortable. Nobody is going to feel at home here with the terms of service hanging over their head, so the essence of what was Kboards is no longer in this forum and that loss is not intangible it is going to be felt and felt HARD, changing the content and availability of information which was so valuable...not to the kboards owners.. but to the people who come here to learn from others who have BTDT.

On another side, I have seen more kick-up-your-heels fun in Timothy's new forum then I have seen here in a very, very long time and I am rather enjoying seeing everyone so relaxed and not needing to choose every word as if they might have just stepped one foot closer to the 9th circle of hell... the emoji's aren't bad either! ;D
Pandorra, forgive me for singling out your post to bold one particular section, but I do feel it is an accurate representation of what many have said. As an early member of KBoards when it was still Kindleboards and there was no Writers' Cafe, I just don't think this is true. The essence of the KBoards Forum is still here while the Writers' Cafe sub-forum is in great upheaval. The demise of the WC may be imminent (at least as it has been known), but many still exist who don't want to see the ending of KB as a whole.

My personal dilemma is whether I want to continue tacitly support a site through posting, Amazon links, etc. when new ownership has treated the creatives who found a home in the WC sub-forum so abominably. Unlike the efforts being made to provide alternate sites for the writers' to continue their discussions without possible chaos to their brands, no such efforts are being made on behalf of the non-writers.

We also have years of discussions, Kindle information, recommendations, virtual and real-life friendships on the line if KB goes belly-up.

TLDR Words matter. The WC is not the whole of, nor the essence of KB.
 
G
#781 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
I'd like to point out that after many pages of abject chaos, not a single practicing attorney has stepped in to explain where I was wrong when I pointed out a copyright transfer requires a written instrument and a signature under U.S. law.
I don't think anyone is saying you are technically wrong. The problem is that, again, this is a matter of civil law and it is expensive to litigate these things. Companies like VS depend on burying people in legal debt (ergo why Helena just smirked "have your lawyers call our lawyers."

Companies do things that are technically illegal ALL the time: from copyright infringement to sexual harassment to racial profiling to age discrimination. But the burden too often falls on the injured party to litigate for justice, which is a burden many cannot afford and thus how certain behaviors continue despite being technically illegal.

Which is why it is important to proactively take steps on the front end to avoid the need to litigate on the back end.
 
#782 ·
TwistedTales said:
You are talking about this forum and I am talking about my philosophy to sharing my identity and information. Before I posted under my real name I gave a lot of thought as to what I'd be giving away and decided I was ok with that. Equally, I thought about my author brand and decided a load of one-star drivebys probably wouldn't do it any good so I chose to be anonymous.

I thought about these issues and made my decisions before I posted anything anywhere, even in 2006 when I put up my first website.

We don't have to agree and I knew posting a different opinion would inflame and here we are.

I haven't got all day to defend my opinion or reasoning nor do I feel the need. I have at least managed to get another view on the table even if it's not a popular one.

PS Someone here just corrected me and I had my first website loaded in 2004. How time flies...
I don't see any flames and I get what you're saying. And there's certainly nothing wrong with your web philosophy. But for those who did not choose anonymity from the git-go, this is a serious clusterfuck just waiting to happen. I think we need to be careful, since posts here are often taken as advice, not to confuse the issue, and more importantly, not to minimize the potential for real harm. If you're anonymous, you're probably okay. It could be a truck nuts forum for all you care. But if your brand is here, you need to be extremely cautious moving forward. I think the legal aspects of this have been explained well enough by others.
 
#783 ·
Which is why it is important to proactively take steps on the front end to avoid the need to litigate on the back end.
That's a point well taken, and I think authors should do what they feel is necessary to protect themselves. Our copyrights are our livelihood, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone we make defending them a priority. The good news is we have formidable built-in legal protection.
 
#784 ·
TwistedTales said:
The reason I'm hidden as an author is thanks to other author's predisposition toward one-star drivebys (you know how it goes in this game).

On my other website I have posted thousands of pages of unique IP created by me and owned by my company. Given that this was how my company made money you would think that was counter-intuitive, but there's a huge gap between reading something and knowing how to apply it. This point is never lost on my clients.

I also developed customized courses for well known universities (free of charge) and spent seven years delivering them as a guest lecturer (I was asked to do it this year, but I've decided to quit). Again, why would I bother?

I'm not judging anyone for their choices, but I genuinely believe in sharing knowledge, so much so that I made vast swathes of it available on the web. That information has been used by companies and students all over the world. It did not harm my brand.

So, I thought this through over a decade ago and concluded better to teach and inspire than to hoard. It's my philosophy and one I have stood by for decades. Do not judge me by my decision as an author because you don't know why I have chosen anonymity on this site, but I still share my findings and opinions even here.
Your generosity with your intellectual property is commendable. I will point out, though, that there is a big difference between sharing voluntarily and having someone else decide to share for you. There is also a big difference between piracy and a corporate rights grab. We all agree piracy is probably not worth pursuing most of the time. As Julie points out, though, if you did decide to pursue it, you'd have a legal leg to stand on. If you consent to a rights-grabby TOS, you may not. At least, it won't be as easy. That's the crux of the argument.

When this started, I thought at first that the new TOS was just standard boilerplate. Thanks to Julie and others for pointing out the very serious deviations. Then I thought VS would make some effort to address those concerns. Instead of doing that, they just poured gasoline on the fire. It's possible that VS doesn't really understand the situation, and why a forum for writers might be different from a forum for auto enthusiasts--but that's not exactly a reason to stick around, either.

Then VS made it more difficult to leave. If I were a company facing that much dissension, I would let the unhappy people go--and, if I truly didn't have any sinister designs on their intellectual property, I would let them delete their whole accounts. Anyway, I followed their protocol and got no response so far, yet another indication of either ineptitude or bad faith. Any reasonable management strategy would either have addressed the identified issues or let the discontented people go without making it a big struggle. VS has done neither. That's not a good omen for the future.

To paraphrase that famous line from Thor: Ragnarok, "Kboards is not a place. It's a people." I wish the best for anyone who stays, but even if the whole thing falls apart--and it wouldn't apparently be the first time something like this has happened--there are other places you can be. The people are what made Kboards what it was, and they aren't going to vanish from the face of the earth.
 
#785 ·
TwistedTales said:
In the end, everyone agreed there is no way to win over anyone who didn't want to be sold. I can't speak to Helena's reasoning, but I sort of understand why she was blunt.
That's very unfair. Users here didn't complain about the sale, or about VS. Some mentioned that the company had a reputation for ruining forums (you can Google it), but that was all.

Complaints started with the weird links and ads. Some links were removed and people were OK. Nasty adds continued being displayed to guests and apparently most people were also fine with that. That's a huge degree of tolerance.

When the new TOS was brought to light, people's reactions was not to say: "Oh, this monster company! They're horrible!". No. The issues with the wording of the TOS were brought up, a lot of people, in good faith, emailed the company or pmd the admin, and the idea was to find a resolution. People only started worrying when the company didn't reply. When they forbid the mods from deleting account, it was clear that they weren't interested in a resolution or in respecting our free will and our rights to protect our information.

Finally, Helena came. She clearly stated that the company needed the TOS in order to be able to post our content elsewhere (such as in newsletters, in her example), and, like you, accused us of being angry because our beloved forum was sold. She also implied we're ignorant and are making false assumptions of legal terms, and that we should have checked with lawyers. When informed that many authors did check with lawyers, her response was a veiled threat.

Anyways, it's fine for you or anyone to accept this, and to be willing to subject yourself to this. To each their own. But to claim that the issue was that people here didn't want to be bought is to ignore the gigantic amount of goodwill shown in the first pages of this thread, for example. It's unfair to Kboard users, and a very unfair assessment of Helena's attitudes.

Again, you want to stay, you think everything is dandy, cool. But please don't twist what happened here.
 
#786 ·
Used To Be BH said:
Then VS made it more difficult to leave. If I were a company facing that much dissension, I would let the unhappy people go--and, if I truly didn't have any sinister designs on their intellectual property, I would let them delete their whole accounts. Anyway, I followed their protocol and got no response so far, yet another indication of either ineptitude or bad faith. Any reasonable management strategy would either have addressed the identified issues or let the discontented people go without making it a big struggle. VS has done neither. That's not a good omen for the future.
Yeah, I think at this point any assumption that it's just a poorly worded Terms of Service or that users are being unfair towards VS is beyond naive.

Further, many people here could have perhaps had their posts deleted much earlier if it weren't for the goodwill and desire to dialogue with VerticalScope.
 
#788 ·
Chad Winters said:
Honestly I can see the problem on their side with post deletion. I like Kboards, its function to me as a member goes down a lot if the 10 years of threads and conversations I have been involved suddenly make no sense because half the posts have been redacted. It would essentially make the site unusable and illegible.
That's a feature, not a bug.

I mean, their perspective is pretty obvious. They believe that by buying the forum, they bought our posts (i.e. our IP)--if not the copyright, then at least a perpetual and unlimited license to use it--and therefore have a right to it. The posts are, after all, what give the forum any value. Therefore of course they want to protect their investment by not allowing us (the ones who actually own the IP, along with our personal data) to remove our property from their possession. It's a bit like a bank not letting people take money out of their own accounts.

The issue is not that we don't see their side of it. The issue is that we argue that they have no right to what they're trying to protect because, despite what they think, it doesn't belong to them but to us.

(And yes, they're not stopping us from deleting/modifying posts--yet. But refusing to allow the mods to do it en masse at our request shows where their thinking lies, and unless their lawyers tell them they legally can't stop us from modifying/deleting posts, I believe they will remove that function at some point.)
 
#789 ·
Chad Winters said:
Honestly I can see the problem on their side with post deletion. I like Kboards, its function to me as a member goes down a lot if the 10 years of threads and conversations I have been involved suddenly make no sense because half the posts have been redacted. It would essentially make the site unusable and illegible.
They're not worried about the forum's usefulness to members. They want to the posts (content) to remain to seed Google and bring in eyeballs to register impressions and clicks for their advertisers.

The usefulness of old posts is another matter. Six months is a long time in self-publishing. Advice becomes dated very quickly, and what was a good tip a year ago could be bad advice today (billionaires are hot! Bonus stuffing is okay!).
 
#790 ·
splish splash said:
I mean, their perspective is pretty obvious. They believe that by buying the forum, they bought our posts (i.e. our IP) [emphasis mine]--if not the copyright, then at least a perpetual and unlimited license to use it--and therefore have a right to it. The posts are, after all, what give the forum any value. Therefore of course they want to protect their investment by not allowing us (the ones who actually own the IP, along with our personal data) to remove our property from their possession. It's a bit like a bank not letting people take money out of their own accounts.

The issue is not that we don't see their side of it. The issue is that we argue that they have no right to what they're trying to protect because, despite what they think, it doesn't belong to them but to us.

(And yes, they're not stopping us from deleting/modifying posts--yet. But refusing to allow the mods to do it en masse at our request shows where their thinking lies, and unless their lawyers tell them they legally can't stop us from modifying/deleting posts, I believe they will remove that function at some point.)
Except that, as I pointed out in one of my earlier posts, they couldn't have bought our IP because it wasn't the previous owner's to sell. If you check out the old TOS, the forum claimed license to it only as long as it was on the site, and then only under the doctrine of fair use--far from the expansive license VS now claims. However they try to modify the TOS, the fact remains that they couldn't have bought something that wasn't available at the time of sale. Nor can they claim we somehow agreed to the new TOS and claim rights that way, because, from what I've read, neither a Canadian nor an American court is likely to rule in their favor on the issue of whether or not a browsewrap agreement is valid if people aren't notified of it.

I'm sure you're right about their perspective, but I think it's not a perspective founded in the law.
 
#794 ·
#795 ·
#796 ·
Atlantisatheart said:
What about the spam at our email addresses (only used to sign up here) from such wonderful places as s-e-x sites, US mortgage lenders (I'm in the UK) phishing scams (Your order is ready - you're order can't be sent because your payment has failed, etc) Hi, I'm Candy and I want to suck... ? You see where I'm going with this? Not ******* cool.
Is this why I've suddenly been getting loads of filth spam all of a sudden?
 
#798 ·
TwistedTales said:
You can be as rude to me as you like, I don't know you so I don't care, but it's about time different views were allowed on this thread. Just because I have a different view doesn't mean you can't have yours as well.

Now, you have yourself a nice day or night, but I don't need to engage with you either. It's a waste of my time.
I read through the numerous post above and I realize every single person has come after you. I mean they have offered their opinion which was different than yours, but we really know that your the victim in all of this. It truly saddens me on this grand conspiracy of everyone that doesn't agree with you is simply rude. How dare they!. Fear not, I will not take part in replying to you anymore for fear that your emotions are fragile enough at this point and time and I do not want to contribute to hurting them anymore.
So I publicly apologize for having a different opinion than you and pointing out your flawed logic earlier. It was not my intention to hurt you and if I had a comfort blanket to offer you as a sign of peace I would.
In due time I hope that you find the strength to move on and that you story of persecution is strength and hope for others who are told things they do not like.

May you live in interesting times!
 
#799 ·
Folks,

Let's stop making personal comments about each other.  You're derailing the thread.

Let's take it as a given that people can have different reactions to what has happened.

Move on.  If anyone wants to know how to use the ignore feature, just ask.

Betsy
KB Mod
 
#800 ·
Over the years, we've garnered advice from the top names in indie publishing on this site. Pure gold. Irreparably tarnished now for me.

It took me a few hours, but since I only had 20+ pages of posts to "modify," it wasn't bad. Then, of course, I had to strip my name and all of my books.

To be honest, I'd been missing the days anyway when WC posters were real, verifiable people. Just for the record, I consider endless hyperbole from anonymous posters (who could be Russian bots for all I know!) to be nothing more than noise.

So long! And thanks for all the fish!
 
#801 ·
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