GoPets CEO Offers Bounty for Help Drafting EULA, TOS, Code of Conduct, and Privacy Policy
August 13th, 2007 by Benjamin Duranske
Erik Bethke, CEO of GoPets (a cartoony “global community composed of real people and virtual pets”) has an offer on the table that may be interesting to regular VB readers: a chance to earn part of a $5000 bounty while helping develop 
GoPets’ End-User License Agreement (EULA), Terms of Service (TOS) Code of Conduct, and Privacy Policy. Bethke says the bounty will be divided up by him in a way that “most fairly recognizes individual contributions.”
Cynics out there may view this as a way for GoPets to save tens of thousands of dollars on legal bills, but it seems like the effort has some real community-oriented purpose as well, and the fact that the documents will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License inclines me to credit Bethke with a “do well by doing good” kind of plan.
The project is already being both supported and criticized for trying to be an “Avatar Bill of Rights,” but reading Bethke’s post, that doesn’t seem like the main purpose his offer. It is worth dropping by, whatever your perspective, as there’s an interesting ongoing discussion. And you could even pick up a few bucks (or Gold Shells, I suppose, if you’d rather) for pitching in.
Related Posts on Virtually Blind
- Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 Conference and Expo (San Jose, Oct. 10-11) to Feature Issues in Virtual Law: "I'm excited to announce that I'll be attending the Virtual Worlds..." (1 comments)
- Association of Virtual Worlds Announces Plans for Business and Professional Virtual World: "The Association of Virtual Worlds, a new social network / virtual..." (3 comments)
- IMVU Deploys Third-Party Age Verification Solution: "IMVU quietly joined Second Life in offering age verification to its..." (9 comments)
4 Responses to “GoPets CEO Offers Bounty for Help Drafting EULA, TOS, Code of Conduct, and Privacy Policy”
Leave a Reply
Notes on Comments: Your first comment must be manually approved, but after it is you'll be able to post freely with the same name and email. You can use some HTML (<a> <b> <i> <blockquote> etc.) but know that VB's spam blocker holds posts with five or more <a> links. VB supports gravatars. Got a gravatar? Use the associated email and it'll show with your comment. Need one? Set it up for free here.
I like this – they reference the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
I’m curious why the licence needs to be licensed? My understanding was that legal documents were conventionally not subject of IP, as to do so brought in strange effects of circularity and potential for abuse.
Indeed. Interesting. I’m curious about what they’ll eventually come up with.
Iang – that’s a good point, though there’s actually been some movement to copyright certain legal documents. I think it’s more a gesture of goodwill than anything else.