One of the issues raised by the critical friends in the lead up to the pitch was how terms of service would be managed if we were going to be using the image on a large number of social networks, and would the users be required to agree to a lot of different terms of service just to use the service.
We have decided that in the initial stages the users will need to agree to the terms of service of taggr, which would be created by a lawyer hired by Tag4Fun.
It would be unreasonable to assume that other providers of etags are going to accept the terms of service created by us and instead there would need to be a standardised terms of service agreed during the standardisation process. In this we would invite input from all of the major companies who would be likely to be interested in etags.
The terms of service would be written in such a way as to ensure that no network can take ownership of the user’s data, as this is one of the design goals of etags. It would also be a requirement that the standardised terms of service do not cover anything beyond the tagging data itself, for example image hosting. This would be up to the social networks and the user can choose which terms they find most acceptable.
The rest of the terms will need to be debated networks who are thinking of adopting taggr, especially with those already hosting this kind of data who may have experience to offer. However this issue lies in the future and in the short term the taggr terms of service will need to be drafted which will be replaced by the etags terms of service when they are standardised.