Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
I was about to sign up for both Blogger and YouTube accounts for RTFV 185, Podcasting Production and Performance (the instructor and some other students already use both sites for class projects), when I noticed the legal agreements to which one must agree to do so—pages and pages and pages and pages of legal agreements. And I am not joking about that: I used the print preview functionality in Firefox to see how long some of them would be printed to standard 8.5" by 11" pages.
With the default font settings, Blogger's Terms of Service page itself requires four printed pages and that single document includes or references several other documents: the ten-page (yes, ten-page) Google Terms of Service; the two-page Google Privacy Policy Highlights, which in turn references the four-page Google Privacy Policy; the two-page Blogger Content Policy; the five-page Guidelines for Third Party Use of Google Brand Features; and Google's far less descriptively named three-page Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Blogger document. That makes thirty pages worth of legal agreements and related documents that Google expects you to read and accept (or to accept without actually reading) before you can use their simple blogging service; signing up for YouTube would add even more pages to slog through. And while the last page of each of my print previews was not always full, the text of each of the pages seemed rather small, so those documents might actually take up more than thirty pages if they were to be formatted like standard printed legal agreements. It's fucking ridiculous. It's much, much, much worse than the legal agreements for computer games and those are already pretty fucking ridiculous. In fact, it is so fucking ridiculous that it's rifuckingdiculous, but even that does not seem sufficient to express the ridiculousness of it; it's rifuckingdiculously ridiculous; it's rifuckingdiculously rifuckingdiculous even.
If there is a clearer sign that a company has transformed itself from a precocious upstart into the man—that its walls have come to represent no longer creativity and possibility first but now yet another stronghold of stodgy rich people who are out of touch with the general public—I do not know what it is. It baffles me that people at the darling company of the Internet—a company that added a copyright notice to its main page not for legal reasons but so people would know the page had finished loading—now seem to think it is a good idea to require users to toil through thirty pages worth of legal agreements and related documents just to use a single Web service.
