<p>I agree with Calmom. Sometimes laypeople are way too intimidated by meaningless, unenforceable legalese.</p>
<p>I fervently hope that calmom is right; I certainly am not an attorney. My comments come from my experience at work, and I’m interested in knowing how these situations differ.</p>
<p>Our customers sign a contract with our company, and they of course have a responsibility to know what they’ve agreed to. On occasion, they have reason to dislike the terms of the contract. But our contract has been written by a very good team of lawyers, and it is essentially unbreakable. Some of our customers see this as unfair, illogical, and morally wrong. Regardless, they originally agreed to the contract and are now bound by it. No customer has ever succeeded in a legal attempt to break it.</p>
<p>Having said that, there have been times when the company has decided to waive the terms of the contract. But that is not because the customer has a legal right to the waiver; it’s the company’s discretion. </p>
<p>My understanding is that even though none of us has signed a contract, the act of registering for membership is our agreement to the terms that CC has set forth, which were written by lawyers whose job it is to protect CC’s interests. Again – I would hope that CC would allow sunriseeast to use her own material as she sees fit. But from my layman’s reading of the TOS, that’s CC’s call.</p>
<p>Please note: Let me make this completely clear – If CC decided to play hardball with sunriseeast, I would be outta here.</p>
<p>LasMa, the contracts your company has with your customers are presumably supported by consideration. That’s why I asked above what the consideration would be for the obtaining of exclusive copyright in the works of another. </p>
<p>Also, if your contracts were written by a good team of lawyers to be essentially unbreakable, I would guess those lawyers were smart enough not to write in any terms that they knew would be unenforceable. Many contract provisions that people would like to have are unenforceable for a variety of reasons. The fact that your company has good lawyers that didn’t put anything unenforceable into the contracts does not mean that that everything some lawyer tells a web site owner to write on their TOS page is likewise enforceable. You are comparing apples and oranges.</p>
<p>There is absolutely no mention of “copyright” in the statement that users of this site agree to in order to enter the site. There is a link to the TOS page and a suggestion that it bee read, but that is in the context of a paragraph that is telling users all the things that they are forbidden from doing (posting profanity, defamatory content, etc.) – so I don’t think that could possibly be construed as reasonable notice to a user of the over-reaching claim that they were surrendering their own rights to use their own stuff in the future. </p>
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<p>Two hard and fast rules:</p>
<p>1) In order to be enforceable in a court of law, a contract must be supported by consideration. </p>
<p>2) Any ambiguity in a contract of adhesion will be construed against the party which drafted the clause in question, and in favor of the non-drafting party. </p>
<p>Again, I’m pretty sure that CC is only interested in covering its own butt to enable it to use material on this board on its own web site, and in its own publications. In that respect, it would probably prevail in most circumstances if a forum poster tried to sue over a republication of some content. That is not only because of the statement in the TOS, but also the fact that this is a public forum. </p>
<p>But in that case they are using their TOS as a shield to protect them against complaints based on what they do with the content. That’s a very different situation than if they are trying to use the clause as a sword to prevent the author of any posts from re-using their own words in a different context. </p>
<p>There’s a good article about copyright here:
[Basic</a> Copyright Concepts for Writers – <em>Writers Write – The IWJ</em>](<a href=“Writers Write...File Not Found”>Basic Copyright Concepts For Writers)</p>
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<p>My bottom line is that I don’t see how the existence of the CC TOS can possibly be construed to be the equivalent of sunriseeast having signed a work-for-hire agreement. She didn’t sign anything and she wasn’t paid anything.</p>
<p>calmom, thank you so much for clarifying the considerable differences between the two situations. And you are correct; at my company, there is not only consideration but a signature.</p>
<p>thank you so much for your clarification…</p>
<p>it is greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s really an issue if they have some rights over my post in terms of use and such. My real concern was whether they will have to right to FORBID me from publishing without their consent. </p>
<p>I doubt that they will be able to publish the book with my material: it’s an intensely personal story and and experience experience not related to college admission and such. Nobody will buy that book from CC, rather than from me or my publisher: besides whatever I post here is only a small subset of what will be in the book, that is, if I decide to indeed publish and if there is a taker. </p>
<p>Now that I have a more piece of mind, I will be posting my latest essay on the original thread I started: </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1048699-my-diagnosis-advanced-cancer-how-help-my-kids.html?highlight=sunriseeast[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1048699-my-diagnosis-advanced-cancer-how-help-my-kids.html?highlight=sunriseeast</a></p>
<p>I started to write my essays mostly to leave something of myself to my kids in case I become part of the “statistics”, and then I realized it’s hugely therapeutic for me, so I kept on writing. Now, I have folks encouraging me to share them more widely, so I am considering the option of publishing. </p>
<p>Any good agent out there? 
;)</p>