The Small Print Project                                       

More Scary / Weird User Agreements from Stephen, (via BoingBoing):

I was preparing to put together some past / present pictures of Lindsay Lohan for an entry on my blog about her recent letter to the family of Robert Altman.

I figured that wireimage would be a place for me to get nice clean images to use for the entry. I was going to pay for the use and
everything until I read their user agreement, which contains this passage:

CUSTOMER SHALL NOT AND AGREES THAT HE/SHE WILL NOT (i) SAVE, PRINT, COPY
OR REPRODUCE THE CONTENT AND/OR IMAGES RECEIVED THROUGH WWW.WIREIMAGE.COM

Does that mean that simply using a modern web browser - which saves images to my hard drive as part of the cache - instantly violates the user agreement?

Yikes!

—–

Stephen — there are still, of course safe havens for grabbing images as you probably already know. Google images can easily be grabbed, but images are crawled and indexed unless they are robot.txt- excluded from Google’s crawl, which means that many copyrighted and not intended for public use images end up there. best bet is using CreativeCommons search engine, or adding them to your Firefox search bar.

Also, support independent photographers or join the crowdsourcing revolution yourself at iStockPhoto, a marketplace of original royalty-free photos at low-cost. (Some fair deals at Getty Images as well.)

TechSoup recently posted this detailed FAQ about grabbing images from the Web.

lohan image from headexplodie’s flickr

Jesse, who previously contributed an iTunes 7 breakdown is back with everyone’s favorite critical security update (distributed every month on the second Tuesday, around the same time that Wimpy gladly pays for his hamburgers).

—–

Lowpoints: “THEY APPLY TO THE SOFTWARE NAMED ABOVE WHICH INCLUDES THE MEDIA ON WHICH YOU RECEIVED IT, IF ANY.”

– Hm, so by “SOFTWARE” they mean “CD-ROM disks” — this might be worth remembering. So you can’t disassemble the disk, for example. Does this include shredding it, I wonder?

“THE TERMS ALSO APPLY TO THE MICROSOFT:
• UPDATES
• SUPPLEMENTS
• INTERNET-BASED SERVICES, AND
• SUPPORT SERVICES

– Hm, what a lot of different names - what’s the difference between a “supplement” and a “support service?”

FOR THIS SOFTWARE UNLESS OTHER TERMS ACCOMPANY THOSE ITEMS. IF SO, THOSE TERMS APPLY. BY USING THE SOFTWARE, YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THEM, DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE.

1. OVERVIEW. At the time the tool is running, the software checks your device for certain malicious software listed at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39249 (“Malware”) and if detected, the software removes Malware from your device. The tool must be run again on the specific device to detect and remove subsequent Malware updates….

– Interesting. So MS can remove anything they please from your computer and you can’t say no — cute.

PRIVACY NOTICE: When the software checks your device for Malware, information is collected from your device only for the purpose of reporting to you whether or not Malware was detected and removed from your device. However, Microsoft may collect and publish aggregated data about the use of the software. If you choose, the software’s reporting functionality can be disabled by following the instructions found at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39987.&nbsp

– Nice that they let you disable the reporting feature - but the page linked is the full manual, and the actual instructions are rather hard to find (I couldn’t find them in a quick search)

[...]

Highpoints: “PLEASE READ THEM.” - Wow, they say please!

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