You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Can You Explain Why This Post Exposing an Alleged High Profile Scammer on Steemit is Censored, Despite a Ratio of 44 Upvotes to 1 Downvote!?
Not at all, Steemit Inc. Is subject to local laws and as such could be compelled to comply with them or face termination. As such they could choose to remove accounts from Steemit and, although I am not familiar enough with the licensing for Steem, could potentially also be forced to effectively enforce laws on Steem too. It's a new technology, so the case law is not clear - i think - however, a blockchain is not an ungovernable system.
Unfortunately that doesn't mean anything, the point remains, that if I didn't agree to any terms they aren't enforceable, it doesn't matter what Steemit Inc the company is subject to, the data on the chain, the tokens, the account is mine, it's not theirs, and they have no right over the blockchain or the data in the blockchain.
They have right to determine who does and does not use their services.
No they don't, they don't have any right to do that. It's my content, it's my tokens, and it's my account.
I am not aware of a single example of that logic being held up and supported in court, but I am not the world's leading 'legal' expert.
Search for it, Terms of Service need to be explicitly agreed to to be enforceable, I've posted links before about this issue from court rulings on this.
The logic is contract law, because nothing was explicitly agreed to there is no way to enforce or honor things that weren't agreed to.
There is some room in US case law for 'common sense' - let's say, in this issue - https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2013/01/22/are-website-terms-of-use-enforceable/#114f6595f4a7
I don't think the situation is clear cut, but I take your point and I don't actually remember whether I was shown a Terms of Service page when I signed up here not.
I might be wrong, but I think that EOS is going to replace Steem/Steemit and I imagine they will be tighter there on the TOS issue.
It's clear cut, you cannot uphold something that wasn't agreed to, like that article pointed out. If you research further cases you will see the pattern, you cannot hold people accountable for something that they didn't agree to.
I appreciate that, however, there is also a caveat which is that space is made for situations where the users of a site, for example, could be reasonably expected to have reviewed the terms of service on a site where they are available.
I don't actually know for sure if the TOS is agreed to or not on signup, because I did it a long time ago - but assuming that they are not then it would not be wrong to say that from a mainstream business perspective, that is a bit of a mistake. I suspect that the heavy assistance they are getting with EOS will mean that there is an agreement to TOS there.