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deviantART: False Advertising?

by dysamoria | April 8, 2008 at 03:14 pm

537 views | 0 Recommendations | 5 comments

Looked up the definition of "deviant" lately? i started an account at deviantart.com a few weeks back only to find that, like flickr (from which i was looking for refuge), the TOU (Terms Of Use) "agreement" is... well... kind of silly. i will allow a friend of mine to explain...

Their TOU really doesn't live up to their name. I would expect something that calls itself Deviant to be more supportive of "material that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, unlawful, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy or publicity rights, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, illegal or otherwise objectionable."

I mean, c'mon... "blasphemous"??? Didn't that stop being an issue a couple of centuries ago?

Something deviant should at LEAST be allowed to be obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, vulgar and objectionable.

I agree with you, this is ridiculous.

This is just the latest example of how commercialization equals homogenization and the degradation of artistic expression and speech. i get the idea of protecting people from unsuspectingly stumbling upon frightening material, but that's what moderation is for. The TOU statement makes self moderation completely pointless. The TOU defeats the spirit of the website in very specific ways.

Hey, DeviantART owners: look up the word you're using to name your product. You silly people. (i'd call you worse, but that might get me censored by some TOU somewhere)

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dysamoria

at 15:23 on April 8th, 2008

ok, NowPublic, this is getting obscene. i use straight HTML. Or none at all. i use your WYSIWYG editor, or the HTML editor. i use code from Dreamweaver. i use your preview.

THE STORY NEVER LOOKS THE WAY IT HAS BEEN FORMATTED!

Amy Judd

at 15:27 on April 8th, 2008

Interesting article... thanks for bringing this to our attention!

dysamoria

at 15:31 on April 8th, 2008

thanks amyjudd

(i spent the last three minutes trying to just add a link and it wont work without putting junk in the display of the story... i've used Safari, IE and Firefox on Windows all with the same results!)

Vands (not verified)

at 18:31 on January 4th, 2009

deviantART is so out. I've had a beef with them ever since I found out that you can't fully delete accounts. You can remove your content and text, but your login name and the account itself remains. Which means that when you read about their "millions" of members you have to consider that fact. But they NEVER mention that in news articles about them. For all we know there could be a few hundred thousand active members on the site at this time and the rest are just dead accounts.

I also think it is funny because they mention on the site that the site does not make millions, but according to the New York Times they earn between 4 million and 10 million per year. They are just as corporate as any other business and they have made their fortunes off shoddy prints and allowing users to exploit copyrights in mass.

dysamoria

at 18:56 on February 11th, 2009

You're right Vands. Yahoo actually resurrected an account i FULLY DELETED when they bought out GeoCities... i wonder why... could it have been to make it look like they had more members than reality showed? Could it be?? ;)

i'm going to start wearing a shirt that has a License Agreement or Terms Of Service... every person that deals with me will have to read it first and agree to be legally bound by those terms or i wont deal with them.

BTW: these aren't legal contracts. if we had the money to take these companies to court, we'd be able to demonstrate that. there still is, to my knowledge, no legal precident that makes these "agreements" legally binding in ANY way. but money is all you need and you can do whatever you want. Lie, Cheat, Steal, and even More!