Re: Found the source of various AIM problems

Lance E Sloan <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.fire.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>

--On Tuesday, February 10, 2004 12:53 PM -0700 Alan Humpherys 
<[email protected]> wrote:
> ... http://www.aim.com/tos/tos.adp
>
> The portion of the TOS covering developers of third party clients
> includes the following wording (which does not apply to end-users):
>
> "...You may not translate, reverse-engineer or reverse-compile or
> decompile, disassemble, make derivative works from, or otherwise attempt
> to discover any source code in the Software.  You may not obtain the
> communications protocol for accessing the AIM service, the AIM Products,
> or any other AOL services. Finally, you may not authorize or assist any
> third party to do any of the things described in this paragraph...."

OK, but what about the section immediately following that:
  
    Restrictions on Access to or Use of AIM Products
     You may access AIM Products only through the interfaces and protocols
    provided or authorized by AOL. You agree that you will not access AIM
    Products through unauthorized means, such as unlicensed software
    clients, and that you will only use AIM Products in conjunction with AOL
    authorized products and components.

If AOL calls the AIM service a "product" (which they do much earlier in the 
document) and they consider Fire to be "unauthorized means, such as 
unlicensed software clients", then aren't Fire users in violation of that 
TOS?

I would say we definitely are.

--
Lance E Sloan
U-M WATS: Web Applications, Technologies, and Solutions
Full-service web and database design, development, and hosting.
http://www.itcs.umich.edu/wats/ - "Putting U on the Web"



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