Injoke

AIM Wants Your Intellectual Property

http://www.benstanfield.c…avesdrops_.html

Our company uses AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) continuously. We’re a small firm spread throughout the country, and the IM conversations we have make it possible for us to have real-time conversations with each other on the cheap. That may all change with AOL’s recent change to the terms of service for their AIM Product.

Prior to the TOS update, we all realized that the information we were exchanging was wildly insecure, and could becaptured and read by anyone, but the risk was small, and the sensitivity of most of the data we passed was very low, so it made it worth the risk. However, take a look at this snippet from the AIM TOS agreement:

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

So, if I were to send, say, a poem I wrote to a friend via IM, Time Warner has the right to publish it without my consent via any arm of their media empire. That’s simply unacceptable. It might be time to look into applications like AIMEncrypt, which encrypts each message with a self-signed SSL Certificate.

UPDATE: AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein states, “AOL does not read person-to-person communications.”