Beware the ToS Rights Grab of Headliner

October 7, 2013 by Suzy Walker-Toye

This is just a warning folks….

This came to my attention recently, wordpress.com has integrated a new 3rd Party Service into its post blogging panel (you know, the panel that comes up after you publish a post). I wondered about it – ostensibly it looks like a great service, who wouldn’t want to promote their posts for free across a range of services? Who ever reads the terms of services anyway? Well perhaps you should, when you read the ToS (Terms of Service), they basically are taking the right to do anything they please with your content, no holds barred

section 5c)

You grant to HEADLINER the unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual fully-paid and royalty-free right and license to host, use, copy, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, sublicense, display, perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, modify, make derivative works from, retitle, reformat, translate, archive, store, cache or otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content to which you have contributed, for any purpose whatsoever, in any and all formats; on or through any and all media, software, formula or medium now known or hereafter known; and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed and to advertise, market and promote same.

Nice. So they have your content forever to do with as they wish. I’m a little disappointed in WordPress.com & their choice of partners. This post isn’t knocking them, wordpress.com provide a great service and I love that its free (funded by the ads they put on your posts but thats ok, they have to make money somehow). This post is to raise awareness of what you are getting into with headliner in the tiny tiny print. According to the complaints on the forums you won’t even get the wordpress stats from traffic flowing through the posts you promote there. I sharn’t be clicking the link but here it is in red in my screenshot so you know what not to click:

UPDATE: Headliner.fm have ameded their TOS and commented on this post – please see here. I still have my concerns and don’t feel ready to use the service, see my reply here.

Shark week 2013

August 10, 2013 by Suzy Walker-Toye

As you probably know its been #SharkWeek this week. Shark week was started on the discovery channel in the late ‘80s as a way to educate people about sharks with a weeklong schedule dedicated to them. The only bit of shark week I caught was a blatant fear mongering piece called great white gauntlet, where abelone divers have to face the danger of diving with great whites without a cage. Well so? They are obviously greedy idiots! Abelone are edible sea snails which fetch a load of cash. Great white sharks are wild animals and need to be respected as such. I wouldn’t go sniffing around a hungry lion or a tiger and expect him not to want to eat me. Any wild animal would so why blame the sharks? Its very sad that the discovery channel isnt taken more oppertnity with shark week to raise awareness of for the plight of sharks rather than the “plight” of greedy idiots.

Sharks in the media are often only portrayed as killing machines and whilst I have a healthy respect for my safety whilst I’m in the water with them, mankind is the aggressor here, we kill millions of sharks per year with the barbaric practice of shark fining (hacking off the fins of sharks and tossing the rest back into the sea to slowly starve to death or drown). Sharks don’t produce many young and the demand for shark fin soup has driven many species to the brink of extinction (as an aside, the same folks who like to eat shark fin soup are usually the same folks who like Abelone). As a tribute to sharks worldwide I give you my list of sharky link. If you have any good ones please add them in the comments below.

http://www.sharkdefenders.com/
http://www.stopsharkfinning.net/
http://www.sharktrust.org/
http://www.sharkalliance.org/

I choose not the eat seafood but even if you don’t want to go that far why not spread the word and take the pledge?