Copyright: Breach Of License (and bigger safety issue).

[#1]

From the terms...

"8.7. If your Post or any element of it is accepted or implemented by giffgaff, you hereby agree to grant to giffgaff an irrevocable, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty free, licence to use, copy, install, maintain, modify, enhance and adapt your Intellectual Property Rights in the Post (this licence shall survive the termination of these Terms and Conditions). giffgaff may also assign its licence to use your Intellectual Property Rights in the Post (or any part thereof) to any third party to which it may outsource the operation of a part of giffgaff's operations or business provided such third party's use, copying, installation, maintenance, modification, enhancement and adaptation is solely for the purpose of providing a service to giffgaff."

There's nothing there about allowing third party websites to scrape content and display it, or transferring the license to third parties such as search engines or web archives and yet that is what is being allowed to happen.

I'm obviously not a lawyer, but I would strongly suggest that this practise is stopped, not just because as a licensee you have a responsibility to ensure that you do all within your power to ensure that you stay within the terms of your license and said license does not grant you permission to have search engines and archive websites to copy and display the content on their website, (you can do that with your intellectual property but not that of others).

More importantly though are the potential safety implications.

You remove much content from here on safety grounds, by allowing other services to copy and display the content you're rendering this totally ineffective and ensuring that people remain at risk from the posts which have been removed from here until the cached versions elsewhere are updated by those third party services, (if they ever actually are).

That's extremely dangerous given the fact that so many here post a wealth of personally identifiable material.

[#2]

RSS feeds need to be truncated too rather than containing the entire submission.

[#3]

@k89bpa

" people remain at risk from the posts which have been removed from here until the cached versions elsewhere are updated by those third party services, (if they ever actually are). "

I know versions on waybackmachine  don't get updated as such, just later copies added.

[#4]

My concern is not about specific services @joolzian, they will all have different policies and practices regarding what they take and make available. It's that ANY service is permitted by giffgaff to do this.

Imagine a 13 yr old with signal issues, using a username which is their full name, posts their actual address in a thread asking for assistance, (or even just their post code).

giffgaff will rightly edit/remove the content in question but the content will still be retrievable by miscreants via other means because giffgaff allow other sites and services to do so.

It is trivial to stop such services from copying, storing and displaying such content.

For safety reasons, (and copyright, especially if the legislation currently making its way through the European system becomes law), we should be preventing this from happening.

[#5]

mmm and the unfare contracts terms and conditions act 1977 says...

about 5 minuets to have it riped up

[#6]

Has this been acted upon?

I noticed earlier that I was having a lot of trouble using Google to find some content in General Discussion, and I've just spent a wee while going through searching for some more recent content from that forum and it appears that the forum is no longer being indexed. 

Is this the case? Not seeking to start something, just seeking an update if one is available. 

(If so, major props for acting so quickly, especially given how long things usually take. If not and if it's accidental please don't revert it, not only will it put the company on safer ground copyright wise but it is a move which greatly increases the safety of people posting personally identifiable information - please make sure it carries to the new platform and please also consider the other suggestions about user profiles too)

[#7]

Bumpity bump, anyone able to shed light?

@alex_w is this your domain?

[#8]

@k89bpa wrote:

Bumpity bump, anyone able to shed light?

@alex_w is this your domain?

It's not my domain, but I've passed it over to our legal team to review and they'll get back to me to share a response once they have one.

[#9]

Thanks @alex_w it's more the safety issue than the copyright one, though to be honest all I'm really asking is in post #6 rather than post #1.

I made another thread about safety after realising that it needed it's own discussion going further but I couldn't find it, (it wasn't deleted, I just can't find it using search).

[#10]

@k89bpa So members who break the rules by publishing personal information are expected to be babysat by giffgaff?

Search engines abroad or indeed at home, GCHQ, for one, look for key words and phrases but also store everything, not to review at the time but to retrieve if and when necessary.

I can make a search as if I was outside the EU area to read stuff that would be otherwise edited/censored within the EU. 

Adult members on giffgaff really do need to abide by the rules without a nanny state intervening at every turn.

With regard to 8.7 there is such a thing as the "Unfair Contract Terms Act" (superceded by) 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Rights_Act_2015

that governs how customers are exploited. For giffgaff to claim they own any part of my contributions is untrue and misleading. Clearly I consent to platform publication but I do not give them permission to use without my permission my contributions commercially.

I can assure you, that they do understand their legal limitations, unless I grant them a specific individual waiver, to exploit my personal albeit public contributions, past, present or future.