SpongePowered Terms of Service Update

SpongePowered Terms of Service Update
@Owen wrote:

Good news everyone! Sponge has now updated our Terms of Service in order to better prepare for the coming release of Ore. You can read over the new terms on SpongeDocs here:

SpongePowered Terms of Service

Overview


This is a short excerpt of several key elements found in the ToS and is not a replacement for reading the actual document, it is provided solely for explanatory purposes and does not constitute a legal document. This summary is strictly for the Terms of Service as updated on March 10, 2018

1. SpongePowered Account & Privacy

• If you create an account on the Website, you are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and you are fully responsible for all activities that occur under the account.
• Sponge continues to take privacy seriously as under our previous ToS, we will not disclose personal information of the User to any Third Parties.
• We expect users to read and observe the community guidelines on any and all of our services and platforms, as set out on SpongeDocs (https://docs.spongepowered.org/stable/en/about/rules.html).

2. Responsibility of Contributors

• If you post material to the Website, post links on the Website, or otherwise make material available by means of the Website, You are entirely responsible for the content of, and any harm resulting from, that Content.
• You acknowledge that the downloading, copying and use of the Content will not infringe the proprietary rights, including but not limited to the copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret rights, of any third party. i.e. You have the rights to publish and distribute that Content.
• Additionally your content should be in keeping with our Guidelines and not be malicious, unethical or deceptive.

3. User Content License

• SpongePowered reserves the right to refuse or remove content at any time and terminate or deny access to any entity at our sole discretion.
• Plagiarism and Piracy of Products may result in an immediate ban from the Service and other Services rendered by the Organization without reprisal.
• We accept no liability for content submitted by Users.
  Forums
• User contributions to the Forums and Discussion Channels (Such as IRC and Discord) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
  Docs
• Except where otherwise noted, SpongeDocs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  Ore
• By uploading content to Ore, you hereby grant SpongePowered a non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free right to retain, publish, and distribute said content.
• By submitting content to Ore, you hereby grant users of Ore a non-exclusive right to access and use the content within the limitations of the license that the content has been submitted under.
• You hereby grant SpongePowered the right to decompile, deobfuscate, and reverse engineer any submitted content in order to assess whether or not your content is compliant with our Guidelines.
• You grant users of Ore a right to access and use your content under the terms of the license your content has been submitted under
• You accept sole responsibility for Content uploaded to Ore, including the compliance with intellectual property rights and other laws and agreements.
• For the avoidance of doubt, SpongePowered accepts no liability whatsoever for downloads made from the repository which are done at the Users own risk.
  Code
• SpongeForge, SpongeVanilla, SpongeCommon and the Sponge API are licensed under the MIT license. There is no contributor license agreement, and contributions to the Sponge project are welcome. We also explicitly grant permission to distribute SpongeForge in any third-party modpack.

4. Responsibility of Service Users

• SpongePowered has not reviewed, and cannot review, all of the material, including computer software, posted to our Services, and cannot therefore be responsible for that material’s content, use or effects.
• By utilizing the Services, you accept that SpongePowered does not represent or imply that it endorses the material there posted, or that it believes such material to be accurate, useful or non-harmful.
• You are responsible for taking precautions as necessary to protect yourself and your computer systems from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other harmful or destructive content.
• SpongePowered disclaims any responsibility for any harm resulting from the use by visitors of our Services, or from any downloading by those visitors of content there posted.
• Attempts to disrupt the Service may result in a ban from all Services rendered by the Organization. You may also be held accountable in a court of Law.

7. Intellectual Property

• This Agreement does not transfer from SpongePowered to you any SpongePowered or third party intellectual property, and all right, title and interest in and to such property will remain (as between the parties) solely with SpongePowered.
• SpongePowered, the SpongePowered logo, and all other trademarks, service marks, graphics and logos used in connection with SpongePowered, or the Website are trademarks or registered trademarks of SpongePowered or SpongePowered’s licensors.

9. Changes

• SpongePowered reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any part of this Agreement.
• It is your responsibility to check this Agreement periodically for changes.
• Your continued use of or access to the Website following the posting of any changes to this Agreement constitutes acceptance of those changes.

What does this mean?


In short, these changes allow Sponge to host and distribute material uploaded to our services while limiting the legal risks involved. Importantly it also means that our Ore Staff will be able to legally decompile and deobfuscate plugins to ensure that they comply with our guidelines.

Additionally, this change concretes the licensing used by our Content and Services in an effort to ensure consistency and reduce the likelihood that we will need to chase up contributors to resolve licensing issues in future. Importantly, we are also retaining our commitment to user privacy as we expand the services available to everyone.

These terms are still liable to be changed in future on the basis of new needs or legal advice, however we shall endeavor to inform our users of any such changes if and when they may occur.

For those of you who have endured all the legalese, thanks for reading through it! We hope that these changes will ultimately enable us to deliver significant services to the community, with a key emphasis on those available through Ore. Stay tuned for more news on that as our brilliant code-monkeys and web-wizards push forward towards release.
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