>It may be legalese -- some lawyers add that kind of talktalk just to stay "on >the safe side"... for them -- yet these (marked out with !!!!!) are the kind >of clauses I would hesitate long and hard (perhaps forever ;-) ) before >signing. Short of a benevolent sponsor, I seriously wonder what we should do.
"You get what you pay for..." :D Kidding aside, I don't expect that to be an issue at all. They put in those phrases so that in case their company/organisation/whatever decides to pull the plug /in toto/ (eg, going out of business), they won't get sued by entities which'd claim that some "contract" mandates they continue the site in perpetuity. Simply keeping backups of the wiki text, or even html dumps of each page to be able to recreate them, would be all that's needed to rebuild a site. Don't forget that here in the 'States, we have people who'd sue the lottery for *not* winning. There's notice, whether on each ticket or elsewhere, that the lottery isn't responsible for typographic errors. Clear, plain, to-the-point, hard to *mis*understand that, right? Well, we had an incident a few years ago where the wrong numbers were published in a newspaper, people wanted to claim their winnings of the supermegajackpot, were told, "Sorry, those ain't the numbers; we gave the correct numbers but the newspaper printed the wrong ones.", yet people sued anyway for their loot. People started spending their "winnings" before they even turned in their "winning" tickets, quit their jobs, etc., now wanted the lottery to make good on the bogus numbers anyway because they themselves were idiots and jumped into the deep end of the pool w/o even checking to see if there was any water in there. Point being, they simply want to cover themselves as having the last word in management of their free wikispace, lest some nimrods decide to suuuuuuue. At least when you're paying for a service, there's an explicit/implicit contract that spells out all the terms up-front. When something's "free", what's the other party get? This "terms of use" legalese is just an attempt to spell out what the other company can do, ie, it *can* go bankrupt, switch to a for-pay hosting site, sell/transfer ownership to someone else, etc., and then make whatever changes are necessary, eg, pull the plug on those sites that don't want to pay a monthly fee if they go fee-based, pull the plug entirely if they go bankrupt, amend the terms of the contract should ownership of the site change, etc., and not have to duke it out in court with 100s of miffed users. I wouldn't/don't have that much of a problem with their terms. Ie, I don't expect them to pull the plug on a wikisite just out of spite or something.
