
500px Terms of Service - DanielRibeiro
http://500px.com/terms
======
icebraining
As much as I think Terms of Service documents are broken, I don't like these
supposed simplifications, because invariably they simplify too much.

For example, in the real ToS, there's this clause:

    
    
        The license granted to 500px includes the right to use your Content fully
        or partially for promotional reasons and to distribute and redistribute your 
        Content to other parties, web-sites, applications, and other entities (...)
    

This is, in my opinion, an important clause that does not appear in the
simplified version of the text.

~~~
NyxWulf
I've been through the process of litigating a contract in court. Not fun, but
definitely was an exquisite education in the school of hard knocks.

Lawyers throw all kinds of language into a contract, that doesn't mean the
intent was there. Vague, unfair, or overly broad language that was not clearly
understood by both parties tends to get reduced, removed, or modified in
accordance with what both parties reasonably understood to be the intent. So
if they tried to get overly sneaky and do something where the basically
version says X, but the full clause says we do X,Y,Z, then the courts may very
well rule the implied intent was X but Y and Z were not implied and agreed to.

If they understand what they are doing, and plan to strictly abide by the
basically section, this is a fantastic idea. If they at some point decide they
want to get sneaky and put something in the detailed version that is not
covered in the "basically" section, they may well find themselves in a world
of trouble if it comes to court.

My experience was a company trying to sue me, despite them breaching the
contract. The judge took a dim view of the crazy clauses in there and was
pretty sharp with them. I expect the same thing would happen here. A normal
user would probably abide by the "basically" section and the courts would
_probably_ take that interpretation. Of course YMMV.

~~~
tomelders
"The column on the right provides a short explanation of the terms of use and
is not legally binding."

That's quite clear to me. If I were to try my luck in the courts, I'd be
pleasantly surprised if the Judge took the "basically" column as the legal
interpretation. Ignorance, as far as I'm aware, is not an acceptable legal
defence (as cited by many a judge to people who neglect to pay their taxes).

The fact remains however, few people read TOS pages or privacy polices. Any
attempt to change that should be applauded in my view.

~~~
Silhouette
_Ignorance, as far as I'm aware, is not an acceptable legal defence (as cited
by many a judge to people who neglect to pay their taxes)._

Be careful not to confuse criminal law with contracts. It is fundamental to
the existence of a contract that both sides understand it. That is one of the
few points of law that is pretty much a universal constant, whatever
jurisdiction you're in.

~~~
comex
Which is somewhat absurd, since most people agree to hundreds of ToS contracts
without reading them.

~~~
saraid216
And the legality of this isn't fully established; in fact, last I heard, it
was being somewhat successfully contested. But there's no sweeping word on the
matter yet: you could probably take a ToS violation to court and have it set
precedence.

------
CharlieA
This is brilliant. It's always seemed crazy to me that terms, laws, and
especially contracts are written in legalese that only a trained lawyer could
really understand, and yet all lay-people are expected to adhere to the
nuances of these rules.

Obviously that simplicity isn't sufficient alone, or we'd just have one law
"Be Good" (even that needs 'good' to be defined properly) -- but having a
summary like this next to the specific details, in "lay-galese" if you will,
it seems like this should be the standard way to write all legal documents.

I hope it doesn't open them up to liability due to the interpretations of the
summary, though?

------
theunixbeard
TL;DR TOS are quite refreshing! Of course I'd be interested to hear if this
opens them up to any liability due to the summaries inherent imprecision...
Can any lawyers chime in on this?

~~~
ryannielsen
At the top, it's explicitly stated:

    
    
      Before using any of the 500px services, you are required to
      read, understand and agree to these terms. You may only create
      an account after reading and accepting these terms. The column
      on the right provides a short explanation of the terms of use
      and is not legally binding.
    

Obligatory IANAL, but that explicit statement probably covers them from any
potential liability from providing summaries.

~~~
gyardley
Has this been challenged yet in a court, when someone reading only the right-
hand column decides they feel all lawsuity? Is this sort of 'user-friendly
interface' covered by existing case law?

IANAL either, and I wouldn't touch this or anything else that hadn't been
vetted by a professional. To me, on first glance, this smells like class-
action bait. "Your Honor, the defendants deliberately misled the plaintiffs by
placing a 'simple' Terms of Service on their website, but then hid their true
intentions in small print which claimed the obvious, prominent version wasn't
legally binding." Who needs that hassle?

~~~
NyxWulf
I'm not a lawyer, but I have been through the process of litigating a contract
in court.

The law does cover this. Contracts are about a meeting of the minds. Do both
parties understand and agree to the terms. Things like email, other written
communication about the contract or terms are all reviewed at trial. It's
amazing how much of the "sneaky" verbage just get thrown out or ignored as
unreasonable or not understood.

------
freejack
We just launched a redesign today that features a new presentation of our TOS
(<http://hover.com/tos>). We take a lot of pride in making all aspects of our
service as useful as we can and didn't want our legalese to be the exception
to that. We abandoned the "Explain This" approach that 500px took on the basis
that we wanted the agreement itself to be friendly, not the explanation of it.
(Well, we want the explanation friendly too, but we thought it would be much
easier to explain if the agreement itself was approachable.)

Its a work in progress, and I think we're a lot closer to where I want to be.
We focused extensively on making it understandable, useful and usable and I'd
love to get feedback on how well we hit the mark (or missed it as the case may
be...). There's still some complexity in there that our lawyers insist on and
I figure we can keep whittling away at it until we get what we really want.

/r

------
Tichy
I was expecting a TOS in ultra small print so that it all fits into 500px
(500px height or whatever).

~~~
tambourine_man
Or something that would have to fit in 500px in 12px Helvetica, Arial. That
would be quite nice actually. Our TOS or EULA is about 3 paragraphs, and
that's it.

------
joshu
I wanted to do this in 2006 for delicious.

The problem is that by placing the simplified terms in the same place, they
become binding. Since they must differ somehow from the actual terms, then you
open yourself to various problems.

~~~
mey
What about simplifying the actual TOS then?

~~~
joshu
That's probably fine. I'm just regurgitating the feedback I got from the
lawyers - you should have exactly one representation of the terms so that
people/courts/whatever don't get to pick and choose.

------
one-man-bucket
Planet Money did an episode on why TOS and EULA's aren't human (as opposed to
lawyer) readable.

Here's a link to the episode:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/21/134633336/why-
are-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/21/134633336/why-are-credit-
card-agreements-so-long)

------
jakobe
If you can write down your terms of service in a simple and clear manner, why
include the obfuscated version?

~~~
LeafStorm
Legal documents are similar to computer programs in that they must be very
precise and follow strict rules of construction. The comments in a program's
source code would not suffice as instructions to a computer, and neither would
an annotation to a legal document suffice for the document itself.

~~~
bajsejohannes
Except, of course, that legal documents are not nearly as precise as
programming languages. And most legal documents have a lot of dead code--
nobody really knows or cares if that code path is followed anymore. You don't
want to be the guy removing sections from a legal document.

------
justauser
This is indeed a nice TOS but I've always been impressed by Tarsnap's legal
section.

<http://www.tarsnap.com/legal.html>

------
pbhjpbhj
> _(iii) for any direct damages in Excess of (in the aggregate) $100._ //

That doesnt sound legal.

It would, if enforceable allow them to only pay you $100 if they wrote off
(destroyed) your car in a crash if it happened that you were a customer. Or
similarly they could duplicate any customer's copyright works and pay only
$100 compensation.

~~~
tchebotarev
Hi pbhjpbhj!

Thanks for pointing that out!

It is legal and very common. It is done simply to limit the liability in
unforeseen events. Some courts can throw this point out during the case, some
may adhere to that. But most terms on the Internet would include it "just in
case".

And no, we won't duplicate customers' works and such — we have build it for
photographers, and we are photographers ourselves. We care about that stuff.

\- Evgeny Tchebotarev, COO, 500px

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _Some courts can throw this point out during the case, some may adhere to
> that._ //

Thanks for your response. I wasn't suggesting, as it might read, that it's not
legal to make the claim. Just that there was no apparent legal value in such a
disclaimer.

I realise it's a technicality but do you, or does anyone here, know of a case
in which such a clause has been valuable in limiting the defendants liability
(or otherwise valuable I guess) and as a follow-up why the claimed limit of
liability is not $0 USD or say 1¢? On the later point consider that one could
be the subject of a class action by a million users (the claimed liability
then would differ 1¢/$100 as $10k/$100M; this suggests there must be a strong
reason to claim at the specific value).

------
rplnt
Funny how site called 500px doesn't fit in my 1000+px wide browser :)

------
tylerritchie
Under the Fair Usage policy (emphasis mine):

Premium accounts are _limited_ to maximum of 1,000 new photographs/images per
week 100,000 photographs/ images in total (approximately 3,000Gb of storage)
and 10Gb of data transfer per month. Awesome accounts that exceed a limit for
several months will be notified of their usage and restrictions may be imposed
if usage is not corrected.

\---

A couple of things. First, what about Plus accounts that exceed a limit for
several months? It would appear that the TOS don't cover any sort of
restriction on those accounts.

More importantly, _limted_ is not how the premium accounts are advertised at
<https://500px.com/upgrade> the Plus and Awesome account don't say "1000
images/week" they say "Unlimited Uploads Upload ... as much as you want."
Additionally no total storage limit is ever mentioned.

I know that the cellular companies and ISPs think that "Unlimited" actually
means "limited" but it doesn't.

un·lim·it·ed, adj. 1. Lacking any controls 2. Boundless, infinite 3. not
bounded by exceptions : undefined

That definition does not have "4. limit to be determined arbitrarily"

500px should either update their upgrade page advertisements to match their
TOS, or--better--update their TOS to match their advertisement.

definition from: <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unlimited> (I'd
prefer an OED definition, but I don't have a subscription)

------
abrahamsen
I like the TOS for this site: <http://ycombinator.com/legal.html>

~~~
dwynings
I really liked YC's Privacy Policy from their original legal page

    
    
      Privacy Policy: We're too lazy to look at log files, and haven't yet written any software to do it.
    
      Terms of Use: When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page.
    

[http://web.archive.org/web/20050324100821/http://ycombinator...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050324100821/http://ycombinator.com/legal.html)

------
NLips
Good legalese IS human readable. The point of legalese is to define everything
in absolutely certain terms. Where words are given unusual or overly specific
meanings, these meanings should be defined in the document. Legalese can be
heavy going, but should never require any knowledge that 90% of the population
doesn't already posses.

Of course, having a simplified version is still nice.

~~~
gosub

        The point of legalese is to define everything in absolutely certain terms.
    

Legalese is what you get when you try to get a precise meaning from an
imprecise language. It is like trying to get the type safety of Haskell in
PHP, resulting in a lot of verbosity.

I think this is relevant: There is a paper+presentation from SPJ about
defining a contract (financial, in this case) in Haskell. Precise and machine
verifiable.

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.htm)

------
steren
This reminds me the "Privacy icons" project. Aza raskin wrote about it :
<http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/privacy-icons/>

Basically, next to the terms of use, easily identifiable icons are displayed.
Something like Creative Commons did for licenses.

------
yaix
What we need is a Creative Commons for TOS boilerplate, to just copy and
paste.

Especially, since most of that lawyer blah is superfluous. Things like "do not
harass other people". Really! We already have /laws/ for that, you don't need
to add any obviously prohibited thing to the TOS.

~~~
hermannj314
Yeah, I have always wondered why community bulletin boards don't come with a
TOS, but internet bulletin boards do.

Someone puts a cork board up in a rec center, they don't feel the need to
inform people that they are not resonsible for the content. What is the legal
situation on the internet that makes people think they need to do this?

Is it just herd mentality or is there a legal reason why you have to tell
people that if they post child pornography that you will delete it?

------
jonny500px
Well done to whoever spotted this. I signed up to this site, and now I will
delete my account. The simplifications are not accurately simplifying what
they should be. Which I think is silly, since the majority of us can read and
think, and see that in some cases the simplifications barely match whats
actually being said.

And I point also and especially to wording like this, which leaves me outright
cold to them as a product _"The registration information you provide must be
accurate, complete, and current at all times. Failure to do so constitutes a
breach of the Terms, which may result in immediate termination of your 500px
account."_

This is a website, that _I_ put photos on, not an application for something
serious.

~~~
tchebotarev
True. But we want you to have the truthful information in case someone steals
_your_ photos. We'll be able to investigate and find out the truth. Having
real name, web-site, twitter or facebook helps us a lot in that.

There has been a few cases like that, and photographers love that we take
proactive approach in solving their problems.

~~~
keenman
Want and need are two very different things.

------
mehulkar
I'm glad someone did this.

But I'm not sure that it really gives me any more confidence in my knowledge
of the contractual agreement than if I hadn't read the TOS at all.

I think a company's TOS is based on the assumption that if the company tries
to use their TOS to take advantage of lots of people, if one person finds out,
everyone finds out. And the company has to answer.

If a company makes their TOS more readable, I'm still agreeing to the contract
on the same assumption. It doesn't matter that I read it. What matters is that
I legally bound myself to the TOS, not the summary.

What would be way cooler was if the TOS summary sections were curated by the
masses (wikipedia style). See, that I would trust and I would be interested in
reading.

------
whackberry
I assume most of us here at HN do some sort of computer development work. In
computers, languages aren't simple, human readable, though modern languages
try to be as readable as possible. Why is that? It's because you can't have
ambiguity. An ambiguous command could set off a nuke...or break a pacemaker
and kill a patient, or something worse.

There is a reason why legal documents are terse, boring, difficult to read.
It's because they need to avoid the natural ambiguities of human language.

Mom just saw a cat in the living room. The mom was in the living room and saw
a cat? The mom was in the kitchen and saw a cat in the living room? See, for a
casual conversation it doesn't matter. But to prove where a murder happened,
it matters....

As much as I hate lawyerspeak(computer programmer here), I understand the need
for a technical language and I understand that the simplifications in that
document WILL allow for ambiguities.

For example: "If you use more than your fair share, we may gradually limit
your account." Can mean anything....

------
yurifury
Their privacy policy is also very readable.

<http://500px.com/privacy>

------
lsiebert
My take away from this conversation is that everyone could benefit from A
simple shared set of TOS and privacy policies, something like open ID for
login or creative commons for copyright sharing. It could be branded so people
can read it once and know how it works. Having a small set of versions would
make case law for one site easily. applicable to other sites, and you could
monetize with a small regular fee to use the branding/trademark , and add a
certain number of hours per year for legal advice/representation in
cases/suits directly related to the TOS and privacy policy as a premium
option. Write once, reuse anywhere.

------
Facens
If you want you can generate a readable privacy policy with iubenda
(<https://www.iubenda.com>), while TOS are coming soon :)

------
RobertKohr
Here is an idea. Simplify the actual terms of service. The TOS can be what was
written under the "Basically" parts.

There is no rule that a TOS has to be convoluted.

~~~
unreal37
The "basically" parts don't cover even 10% of the actual terms. As others have
said, there are tons of restrictive language in there that are not even hinted
at under basically.

------
ck2
I cannot see half the page because my browser width is 1024px

Should people really be expected to horizontally scroll a dozen times to read
a page.

~~~
OzzyB
This site seems to be the perfect example I was looking for during yesterday's
discussion on the ever-increasing size of users' screens.

I _know_ you are a photography site, and you want your photos to be big &
beautiful -- but this is not necessary.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3827737>

Oh, and one the subject of TOS; I believe a legal document, is a legal
document, is a legal document -- trying to "paint over" your terms with
"friendly" prose isn't helping the user and is also unnecessary...

------
latchkey
We took the approach of a human readable TOU and Privacy Policy (with a bit of
humor thrown in):

<https://www.voo.st/about#tou>

<https://www.voo.st/about#privacy>

------
littlejim84
This is a nice approach and I think a lot of companies will follow suit. I
wonder, are there any good links or resources on generating the Terms Of
Service or Privacy Policies in the first place? Or is a lawyer always
required?

~~~
Facens
Did you try <https://www.iubenda.com> ?

~~~
littlejim84
Wow, that's great thanks!

------
neetij
Bagcheck has done this previously - <http://bagcheck.com/terms>. I feel it is
a lot more readable because the actual legal code isn't in 'fine print'.

------
CommonTerms
The CommonTerms project (<http://commonterms.net>) is working on a common
framework for easy previewing of TOS documents.

Your feedback is welcome!

------
ForrestN
Reading this just reminds me how awful the state of copyright is. We need a
new way for producers of images (and any other digital art for that matter) to
make money.

------
clemesha
Breath of fresh air. I've never seen a ToS like this before.

------
ams6110
I like how the terms require the users of the service to "be responsible" but
disclaim all responsibility on the part of the service provider.

------
mynegation
FWIW, they posted their response as a blog entry: <http://500px.com/blog/114>

------
angrytapir
"To fully use the services you need to create your own account, without
violating other peoples' rights."

That misplaced apostrophe is killing me.

------
jpegleg
I think the simplifications are very well designed but ideally they should be
accurate. Thanks for sharing.

------
mkoukoullis
I love it! Lawyers would hate it.

------
lugia
I can definitely see the big difference between lawyer language and make-sense
language.

------
pestaa
First I thought this is a template other services could copy and put up on
their site.

------
_seininn
that's why we need something like the gpl for toss. this way, we know EXACTLY
what the terms are without reading the whole thing.

------
chess92
brilliant ... no one listens to me when I say SIMPLICITY is the biggest way to
success in the tech world.

~~~
chess92
people don't like to think, they want easy, fast, simple.

------
johnhartigun
Laws should have TL;DR versions too.

------
dzorz
> approximately 60Gb of storage

Is that Gb or GB?

------
CowCaBob
Never trust the big print.

~~~
rollypolly
That's a good point. It can work for a website TOS, but it wouldn't work for a
home sale contract for example.

------
ThaddeusQuay2
The only good TOS is one whose URL returns a 404.

