There's a Pan Am Games? - Landing with a thud
Even the people of Toronto don't seem to care.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/world/americas/in-an-apathetic-toronto-the-pan-am-games-land-with-a-thud.html?_r=0
Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue
The organisers of the Pan American Games in Toronto, which start this week, require that people seek formal permission to link to its website at toronto2015.org. Under the website's terms of use, amid piles of incomprehensible legalese seemingly designed to hide from the fact that social media exists, it is decreed that no one …
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Monday 13th July 2015 16:17 GMT keith_w
Re: There's a Pan Am Games? - Landing with a thud
Of course we care. We care about the traffic jams that have resulted from a)changing the existing HOV lanes and b) dedicating 1 lane on the highways which don't have HOV lanes as an HOV lane so that both of them are restricted to vehicles carrying athletes, people with games passes or 3 or more persons.
We also care that the food vendors near the Rogers Centre (formerly the Skydome) were banned during the opening ceremonies and will be banned during the closing ones as well. We also cared that every one entering the Rogers Centre was searched to ensure that no one was smuggling in their own bottle of water or bag of peanuts, ensuring that the vendors inside were able to charge exorbitant amounts for the aforementioned water, other beverages and sundry snacks.
We also cared that they changed the finals for at least 1 of the events so that people who had bought tickets for that time and place were not able to see the event which they had intended to.
I am sure we are going to care a lot more if we get the Olympics that are now planning to bid for.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 16:42 GMT TheProf
Sue ball
Can I sue anyone over the fact El Reg has brought to my attention a sporting event of some kind?
I do not like sport and now I will be in constant fear that a stranger will try to start a conversation about sporting people in Canada. (Can I say Canada without being sued? Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada. Yes, that seems fine.)
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Saturday 11th July 2015 16:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Strickly speaking, anyone who links to the website or even anyone who uses the games' own hashtag of #TO2015 is violating its terms, and could be sued."
Site terms of use are only relevant if you want to keep using the site. Doubt if you can be sued for breaking any part of a ToS unless the way you break it also conflicts with an existing law. You can deny a user access to a site if they break the ToS, but that's about where it ends.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 18:46 GMT John Brown (no body)
Exactly. Linking to the site is not "using" the site. Anyone following the link to the site is "using" the site, but unless and until they read the ToC , it means nothing to them either.
I don't know about Canada, but here in the UK we have laws about unfair terms and conditions which means specific terms will be laughed out of court if anyone tries to enforce them and depending on the circumstance, could potentially invalidate the entire ToC document.
As the article points out, these lawyers really don't have a clue.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 19:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's a common mistake to assume that just because something is written in legalese, that it is in any way legally enforcable. I had one site where part of the conditions of use was that users must wear a squirrel costume in order to use the site. It was there for years, and nobody ever noticed.
Mostly those documents are arse-covering for the site owner/creator...several pages of "if you do anything illegal using our kit then it's down to you". There may also be somewhat optimistic "expected codes of conduct" which are usually only read so that people can make sure that they've broken all of them and not missed any. Some -like El Reg's- are pretty reasonable (although having a "no trolling" rule and allowing a comment thread immediately afterwards was a bit on the masochistic side, if you ask me. Also quite meta; because asking El Reg commentards not to troll is a troll in itself. Some are power-wanks on the part of the site owners, and some attempt to modify user's behaviour which is about as successful as you'd expect. Legality (apart from the arse-covering) doesn't really come into it. Mostly it's simply a matter of "how much do I fear getting banned from this site" that dictates the amount of attention you need to pay to these things.
Either the Toronto chaps are very stupid indeed, or they have a clever marketing department who know that if the internet is asked to do something it will immediately do the opposite. Personally, I'm not going to link to Toronto2015.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 18:51 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Some slightly more subtle errors
An easy mistake to make. Obviously "The Games" are every four years and the The Glasgow Games was only last year so they remember that. The London Games were a long time ago, long forgotten and were obviously four years prior to The Glasgow Games. So that means the Toronto games will be in 2018. Simples...err....really....
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Sunday 12th July 2015 11:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not yet
Twitter, of course, could fix this by applying a suitable licence to posts which prevented this (i.e. it is a condition of using this site that you do not trademark any hashtags, and anything in the format of a hashtag which is trademarked will be removed from this site without warning.) If they haven't done so it may be because they are trying to work out a way to make money out of it. Before they go bust...because although revenues are increasing, so is the first derivative of losses.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 17:36 GMT Phil Endecott
Isn't TO-2015 a power transistor package?
(The closest I can find is TO-201, which is a coaxial transistor! If you want to waste the rest of your weekend exploring a dinosaur's graveyard of obsolete transistor packages, have a look at https://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/focus/registered-outlines-jep95/transistor-outlines-archive )
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Sunday 12th July 2015 11:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Isn't TO-2015 a power transistor package?
I can't remember if they were TO-3 or another large metal power package of the era, but as I recall the technicians who serviced the CU Titan computer used to identify blown power supplies by tapping the transistor cases and listening for the rattle of a large germanium die that had fallen off.
On another occasion I discovered that an "engineer" at one company I worked for had built a large custom DC power supply using paralleled 2N3055 - which some of you may remember - but with neither ultrafast fuses nor any proper means for ensuring correct current sharing in the output stage. I discovered this when the supply went titsup*, and two cases had arced through leaving large holes while a third one was just in the process of melting when the power was tripped. At least you could see what was happening.
*transistor internal transfer of silicon by unexpected plasma.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 18:39 GMT Stevie
Bah!
I think the letter would have been more helpful if you'd pointed them to a blacklisting service so they could stop all links from everywhere before they are attempted. Then they just need to have their DNS records expunged and it's job done, I should think.
Unless you think they would be safer simply turning their servers off?
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Saturday 11th July 2015 19:03 GMT Turtle
Re: "First kill all the lawyers"
"First kill all the lawyers"
It was said by Jack Cade's follower Dick The Butcher in Shakespeare's Henry VI; it was in the midst of a harangue in which Cade lays out his, errr... social-political program.
Consider the following: "'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers' You know the line, from Shakespeare's 'Henry VI, Part 2.' Like a mantra, it is mindlessly quoted by pundits, stenciled on T-shirts and generally marshaled as condemnation of the legal profession from the very pen of the Bard of Avon. Not only is this a gross calumny, it is a symptom of gross cultural illiteracy.[...] Dick the Butcher shouts enthusiastically, 'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.' There it is - the phrase so frequently used to damn the legal profession, shouted by a butcher in response to an ex-convict and confidence man who was in London to foment anarchy, burn the city and loot the commonwealth. But that's not all. Cade shows us what his world would be like without lawyers. Immediately after Dick the Butcher mouths his famous line, a clerk enters. Someone accuses the clerk of being able to write and read. Cade orders, 'Hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.' Yes, second thing let's do, let's kill anyone who can write or read." (http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-14/local/me-1614_1_jack-cade.)
I don't know if this was an idea ever espoused by the real Jack Cade. It might not have been, as Shakespeare's account of Cade and the events surrounding him seem to be quite ahistorical.
Shakespeare wrote the line but that's not nearly enough reason to think that he espoused the idea himself. He put those words in Cade's mouth to show the audience the barbarity and ignorance of Cade and his followers.
I have also seen the quote attributed to Leon Trotsky, who might have been well-enough read to know it from a translation of Shakespeare. I do not know if Trotsky ever said it or not, but it would have been both appropriate and ironic if he had.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 19:12 GMT volsano
I would be happy to link to one of their pages.
But, in return for their permission, I would require to be informed no less than 21 (twenty-one) days in advance of any changes they intend to make to that page -- that includes but is not limited to embedded advertising, javascripting, visible text, invisible text, CSS classes attributes and tags, non-visible comments, HTML alterations, and images.
Otherwise, how can my overworked and under-ferrari-ed lawyers ensure that we are still linking to the information we originally linked to?
Fair's fair.
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Saturday 11th July 2015 19:21 GMT Len Goddard
Catch 222
According to these cretins, you automatically accept the ToCs by visiting the site, even if you don't read them or know they exist. Furthermore, they reserve the right to change the ToCs but by accepting the original ToC you agree to be bound by the changes.
This is not the work of a real lawyer. It is the work of some incompetent who looked at the cover of a law book in a school library somewhere. A real lawyer would surely make some attempt to produce something which would not be laughed out of court with extreme prejudice. Surely?
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Monday 13th July 2015 14:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Catch 222
"This is not the work of a real lawyer."
Or maybe it's the work of one who thinks he can put in any terms- legally-enforceable or otherwise- in there and at worst the ones which *aren't* will (possibly) be struck down *if* they get to court (but enough people will believe that they are enforceable and/or don't want the hassle in proving it) that they have a chilling effect.
Of course, this only works if you don't take it too obviously beyond the bounds of credibility for even Joe Public- something which evidently hasn't worked on the Reg in this case. :-)
I suspect that most such unenforceable terms like this are a combination of incompetence, laziness (cut and paste boilerplate from elsewhere, whether or not it makes sense in this context) and the dual cynicisms of throwing enough mud at the wall and hoping some'll stick and/or hoping that Joe Average will be intimidated into believing they're enforceable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
