Back in January, it came to my attention that the following clause is found in the legal section of RPG RPG Revolution's webpage.
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User Submissions Not Privileged
Any material, information or other communication you transmit or post to this website ("Submissions") will be considered non-confidential and non proprietary. iEntry shall have no obligations with respect to your Submissions. iEntry and its designees will be free to copy, disclose, distribute, incorporate and otherwise use your Submissions and all data, images, sounds, text and other things embodied therein for any and all commercial or non-commercial purposes. You are prohibited from posting or transmitting to or from this website any unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic or other material that would violate any applicable law.
Essentially, this means that they (iEntry, the company that provides RRR with hosting) own anything you post on their website, and can use it for whatever they want, without your permission. They can even profit off of your work.
Now, this came to my attention in January and I am posting now why? Because iEntry sent an email to one of the RRR admins. Here is the important part (after this was just a copy/paste from Youtube's TOS as an example)
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Hello all;
I am Jay Fougere, IT Manager for iEntry Inc.
I understand that the wording in our legal notice is a bit ambiguous and has lent itself to misinterpretations.
First of all, iEntry does not want to "steal" anyone's content. That particular section in the legal notice is there to provide us with permission to publish your content on RRR and to be able to promote RRR on other sites etc.... Basically, it is saying that by submitting your content, we have your permission (as copyright holder) to publish that content on the site. It is also saying that any content you publish could be used on another of our sites to promote RRR.
RRR could not exist without some disclaimer to this effect, and that is a standard boiler-plate statement. In fact, the person who was blogging about how they have no statement to that effect puts themselves in a precarious situation. If there is no disclaimer (as they claim), they cannot legally publish any of the replies they receive to their blog as they have never obtained the permission of the copyright holder of those replies (either directly or implied)!!
Now I understand the concerns that iEntry is going to take your games and republish them for profit. That is not our (now or in the future) intention however it is very difficult to distinguish between that and permission to publish on RRR and our other network sites. In fact, the reason it specifically mentions commercial distribution is twofold; first of all any advertisements sharing a page with any of that content constitutes commercial distribution - secondly, simply being on our servers (which are owned by a corporate entity) makes the use commercial.
"Yes it says we can, but we won't do it. Don't worry about it, we'll change it"
Guess what, they haven't changed a thing.
RRR Legal PageScroll down, you'll find the exact same block of text that I quoted at the beginning of this post.
If you want your work to remain yours exclusively, without any chances of someone taking it, do -not- post it on RRR.
It's not even illegal for them to take it from you, as it's in the site's Legal info, and you're essentially giving them the right to take it, by simply sharing it with the community.
You have been Warned.edit
Ientry also owns this site
http://www.rpgmakervx.net/