A GThing Science Project

As I was going through my Google Reader RSS feeds today, I noticed this little gem at the bottom of one of the articles from TUAW:

My immediate thought was that it was interesting how they have terms of use for their RSS feed, but you don't know that until you've already accessed their RSS feed. I decided to check out these terms to see what I had agreed to without knowing I had agreed to it.

The emphasis is mine. By accessing TUAW's feed, I am agreeing to the terms in this contract. Not only that, but I'm agreeing electronically, which is I guess different than agreeing organically or agreeing whole-heartedly. I guess I'm supposed to act like a robot while I made this agreement.

I shouldn't have been so quick to unknowingly agree in my electronic voice to these terms! Apparently I am prohibited from using any robot, spider, or other device to monitor the content from their RSS feeds. That pretty much eliminates news aggregators, feed readers, search engines, or anything else that is not a "manual process." Oh wait, monitoring the feed through a manual process is also prohibited, so I'm not even allowed to open the feed in my browser or text editor and look at the raw XML.

By the way, RSS stand for "Really Simple Syndication."

I just wanted to mention that.

What does it mean by "use" the RSS service? Does reading the RSS feed count as "using it?" That's the only way I know of that media is supposed to be consumed. How can I know I'm not supposed to "use" the content until after I've already read it and therefore "used it?" These are all questions I'd love to have answered. Furthermore, logic dictates that if there is some content on their website that fits the above criteria, it is also in their RSS feed. How am I to filter out such content? Why was that content on their website in the first place? Why am I held responsible for their poor choice in subject matter?

They're essentially saying "We can have hateful content on our site, but you can't use it."

This is saying that they own the RSS service. Since there were no definitions in this contract, I must assume that they are talking about the RSS format. They own the whole thing, at least I'm agreeing that they do by accessing their feed which, by the way, I'm not allowed to do through any automatic or manual process.

"We can take back our content at any time, and you have to stop evening thinking about it. We reserve the right to lobotomize you so that you stop 'using' our content by thinking about it."

"If our RSS feed comes to life, jumps from the computer screen and kills you, it's not our fault." I think we've all seen that scenario played out. I'm glad they made that clear.

Apparently we all have to "transact" with Weblogs, Inc. That sounds like nefarious robot speak for some kind of sexual congress. I'm just thinking that if I have to agree electronically, they might be wanting me to do other things electronically as well. Sorry Weblogs, I just don't feel that way about you.

Apparently we're agreeing to some other document by accessing the RSS feed that we're not allowed to access. I'm not even going to look at that to find out how many other agreements I might have made.

My favorite part of the contract is where they tell you they can change it at any time without notice and that you automatically agree to it. If they want you to agree to being Bill Gates' towel boy, they simply have to write it into their next revision and there you go - YOU AGREED TO IT ALREADY!

Then that last sentence doesn't seem to make any grammatical sense, but maybe I've been staring at a computer screen for too long.

By the way, I just want to note that by posting a screenshot of the terms notice from their RSS feed, I have broken the agreement in several places. I invite the Weblogs, Inc. legal team of monkey's who wrote this thing to try to sue me for all I'm worth.