The Terms of Service (TOS) that accompany the Oculus Rift have raised concerns from users and potential users. UploadVR report; Oculus ‘Always On’ Services and Privacy Policy May Be a Cause for Concern. Gizmodo report; There Are Some Super Shady Things in Oculus Rift’s Terms of Service. techdirt report; Oculus Users Freak Out Over VR Headset’s TOS, Though Most Of It Is Boilerplate.
The concerns raised will sound rather familiar in parts for Second Life content creators. This is especially the case for parts of the TOS such as this :
Unless otherwise agreed to, we do not claim any ownership rights in or to your User Content. By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual (i.e. lasting forever), non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable (i.e. we can grant this right to others) right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services.
Sections of a TOS such as this can sound worse than they actually are. A lot of those rights are required for companies to carry your content and transmit it to other users. The article over at Gizmodo suggest that the result of the above is :
If you create something using Oculus’ services, the Terms of Service say that you surrender all rights to that work and that Oculus can use it whenever it wants, for whatever purposes
I’m not convinced that’s quite true but it’s not hard to see why people come to that conclusion. techdirt point out :
The problem with getting hysterical over the TOS is that this language is essentially boilerplate, and attached to the terms of service for pretty much every service in existence so they can make a sharing technology work without being sued over copyright. While certainly worded poorly there’s no real nefarious intent; it’s CYA lawyer language.
The UploadVR article takes a closer look at the privacy angle and the privacy policy that is incorporated into the TOS.
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