Terms of Service Update (March 10, 2025)
Hello all,
The Terms of Service of the forum have just been updated with consensus from the moderators. The most prominent change is that the forum’s aim has been explicitly outlined:
Our Aim
The forum’s aim is to further peace-on-earth via enabling sincere discussion of and experiential engagement with actualism for the purpose of bringing about the spread of virtual freedom and actual freedom, as detailed on the website of the Actual Freedom Trust, which legal entity has the same aim and exists “to promulgate and promote the words and writings explicating the workings of an actual freedom from the human condition and a virtual freedom in practice” [1]
To further this aim, we encourage sharing of the writings and discussions within, and seek to maintain them as an accurate, generally unmodifiable historical record for posterity, for the benefit of current and future readers. This has important licensing and editorial implications for your content.
The most significant change is in the licensing terms for the content users post on the forum (see: Your Content section).
To explain: under the old terms, when users would post content, they would only offer a license to the forum itself to allow it to publish the content (i.e. to operate normally as a forum). This introduces some legal ambiguity for those who re-present this content on other websites. Most notably, Vineeto has been publishing her posts from this forum onto the AFT site (link). Although legally she owns the copyright to her own posts, her posts include quotes from other members’ posts, which members do retain the copyright of.
Practically speaking, this type of quoting probably falls under “fair dealing” in Australian law (similar to “fair use” in US law albeit a bit more restrictive). However, to eliminate any ambiguity, posts made from this day on will be licensed under a creative commons license, similar to the one Wikipedia uses for its content. This means that users retain copyright to their own posts but give an irrevokable license to let anyone use, share, and adapt the content with proper attribution.
This creative commons licensing only applies to the posts in unrestricted/public categories (viewable from anywhere on the internet). Restricted posts or personal messages still remain under the old license.
Basically the intent of this is to legally formalize what is common-sensical anyway: posts made on readable-by-anyone-on-the-internet pages are able to be copied and reproduced elsewhere, while posts with some visibility restrictions are not (albeit some reproduction in form of selective quoting might still fall under fair use/fair dealing albeit with potential additional privacy implications).
Additionally, the Terms of Service was updated to make it explicit that the forum is not necessarily obligated to edit or delete or allow the unrestricted editing or deletion of any posts. The intent of the forum is for it to be a generally unmodifiable historical record, for maximum benefit to present and future actualists. If someone made a mistake or said something they regret, the preference is to address this later with another post rather than try and erase the past.
That being said, the idea is for the moderators to be accommodating for legal and privacy and other compelling reasons, and there are various options to address these, such as editing or redacting just problematic portions of posts (rather than entire posts or threads), changing usernames for anonymity purposes, adding staff notice disclaimers to posts or threads where clarity or warnings are warranted, etc. It is the position of the moderators that these conditions were enforceable under the previous Terms of Service as well; as such this is more a making explicit that which was already the case rather than a substantive change in the terms per se.
(This is an apt time to note that around September 2024 or so, the edit and delete functionality was restricted to allowing edits just a few hours after a post, and removing user-initiated deletes, with similar intent in mind and with the FAQ being updated at the time to reflect the new policy.)
In addition to the above, ownership of the forum and domain name was legally transferred to the Alan Izatt Actual Freedom Fund. This was done to limit any legal liability arising from anything related to the forum, to a corporate entity rather than the previous forum owner as a person per se.
Finally, a section was added to the Privacy Policy to make it explicit that personal messages are not actually private, and are readable by administrators, moderators, and anybody with access to the forum backups:
This is not a change but rather a making more explicit of that which is already the case.
Thank you all for your attention. Any feedback is welcome. This topic will remain bannered for 2 weeks.
Cheers,
Claudiu
See the following threads for a short-lived attempt to implement encrypted private messages:
- September 2021: Paper key? (“Can any of you guys shed any light on what this is about?”)
- September 2021: Discourse Encrypt plugin (“As in this forum several staff members asked to keep the possibility of totally private messages, this plugin allows a personal message to be read only by the sender and the receiver as long as they have both enabled encryption.”)
- December 2021: All private messages will be deleted (“The encryption plugin for private messages is causing more problems than it solves and will be disabled on the 10th of January 2022.”)
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