Posted on Sunday, March 13, 2005 - 4:50 pm:

---

quote:

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

---

Posted on Sunday, March 13, 2005 - 10:31 pm:

---

quote:

AOL is trying to get businesses to sign up and actually pay them for it's AIM @ Work offerings with the same Draconian Terms of Service I discussed in my last post.

AIM @ Works is really nothing more than some add-on tools to the regular AIM client. One lets you reserve a domain (like Apple does with @mac.com addresses) for a monthly fee. Another enables Outlook address book syncing. All of this is on top of what AIM is really good at, normal text chatting.

So they're encouraging businesses to use AIM to discuss details of their business correspondence, even to sync their Outlook contact and calendar files, which, according to their TOS, AOL then has the right to publish in any way they see fit, including, among other things, providing that information to business competitors.

---