Aka-Aki Profiles

Since I mentioned the profile stickers before I felt like a had to at least address those, so, here is the Aka-Aki profile stuff.

Profiles are basically like any old social platform, you enter your personal data and it goes into the magical black box. Nonetheless, their approach of not displaying real names and only using them for search results is commendable, especially in light of the competition. While it's a decent approach, it's hardly sufficient.

Extra Credit Opportunity: Write a parser that takes a long list of first names and last names and run them each through the search field, cross-reference and create a reverse-lookup table and put it on BitTorrent. (Disclaimer: No, don't actually do it!)

Apart from that minor problem the profiles let you list your preferences in many different categories and you set those values through “stickers.”

When you upload a sticker, you basically create a group centered around an image with a specific title and decide to either let people join freely or only with the approval of a group owner. The stickers become a problem when you actually want to upload one. On the form it states that by uploading you basically agree to hold all rights to the image including copyright, trademark, etc or have explicit permission from the owner.

A CC licensed work could probably be construed to be an explicit permission for most cases but apart from that, permission to that degree becomes difficult. For example, the FreeBSD name and logo are trademarked and explicit permission from the FreeBSD Foundation would be necessary to start a user group on this network for it. This is not to say that asking for it would not be an option but it complicates the issue.

Now, looking at the list of stickers available, the majority of users are clearly violating the terms of use and while it's understandable that the company wants to indemnify itself against potential claims of rightsholders their terms of use seem more of a suggestion than a rule.

It should give the users pause because this company is (and most of the users are, too, important for the principle of causer) based in a country without laws for free of charge take-down notices (one of the very few things that's good about the DMCA). So I wouldn't be surprised if one of them got a take-down notice someday with a hefty bill attached.

(Disclaimer: None of this is in any way legal advice.)

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Update:
Apparently, getting sued for using stickers/icons and similar low quality versions of copyrighted content did happen to a member of a poker site recently.