for any legal (or just knowledgable) folks on my flists

[kaigou]

[Site-name redacted since that's not the issue.]

I think I'm getting what they're saying, and I'm not sure I'm liking it, so maybe I'm missing something. What does the following mean, in real-world non-fancy terms? Or at least, what's your impression of what it (might) mean?

"By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") on or through the Services, you hereby grant to [site], a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Services or otherwise have the right to grant the license set forth in this section, and (ii) the posting of your Content on or through the Services does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of any Content posted by you to or through the Services."

Comments

[kaigou]

Ayup, that's about how it works when you don't want to bother with legal advice (or the legal advice you bother with doesn't, in turn, want to bother with your stupid questions). REminds me of the time I almost signed a rental agreement, stopped, read the fine print, and realized it had to have been cobbled together from the first page of an apartment rental sheet and the second page of a video rental membership! I guess the landlord figured it was all rental stuff, right?

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Or the legal advice you're bothering with doesn't want you to have heart failure, or to fire them for the bill they ran up with outside counsel, when you find out what it cost to get the dedicated attention to your questions.
A couple of hours of going over a model the lawyers found somewhere else maybe isn't too horrible at $400 an hour, but the time investment to either throw a specialist at it or make sure a not-quite-specialist is current on all issues affecting the industry, think through all the issues presented by your particular circumstances, write up a custom TOS, and then go over it with you and revise in light of your comments -- well that same $400 starts piling up into something that looks really nasty.

A lot of the time, at least in my experience, the lawyers would love to be bothered by your questions. It's what makes the law fun and interesting, when it is fun and interesting. They just don't want you to kill them.

Your almost-landlord, however, sounds like he was treating the law as a species of magical incantation. Wave a few pages around, say something in Latin; isn't that how it's supposed to work? What could go wrong? And where did all these dancing mops come from??