They've changed it..

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Xtra does not claim ownership of any content or material you provide or make available through the Services ("Customer Material"). However, by placing any Customer Material on our Websites or Systems (including posting messages, uploading files, importing data or engaging in any other form of communication), you grant to Xtra a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide licence to do the following in respect of the Customer Materials:

* use, copy, sublicence, redistribute, adapt, transmit, publish, delete, edit and/or broadcast, publicly perform or display, and

* sublicence to any third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the rights granted,

in each case for the limited purposes for which you provided or made the Customer Materials available or to enable us and our suppliers to provide the Services.
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Still doesn't bother me - I don't use them and everybody I knew who did quit ages ago. Everyone's got til May 4 to abandon or attack.

Ignore the clause (you already had it) - it's 8am and I've just woken up. ^^;;

I was just reading the "did you know" links to the right and the rumsfeld one is hilarious!!!!

Im with them because they offered me the cheapest deal for unlimited time.

This only bothers people who host files with Xtra. I myself, have never been one to use ISP hosting, dont ask me why. Its always been there, Ive just never used it.

To me as a plain old web surfer, this change doesnt matter. So Ill continue to use them.

Let me put this into perspective for you. A hosting ISP is like a photocopier. you put your nickel in and you use a technical service and the machine and the people running it has no access to the information you are coping on the machine. But what if they made sticker and put it on the back of the machine that said that all copies would me recorded and the recording would be owned by the company. So if you copied your tax return they could sell the financial info to the highest bidder. Or if you copied your ass they could sell that to a German fetish magazine.

I quote "Xtra does not claim ownership of any content or material you provide or make available through the Services ("Customer Material"). "

Surely that means that all the things you do and create as a byproduct of their services means is safe. Such as the sites you visit, the files you download, the files you're sharing on Kazaa.

It is only the things that you store on their servers they can claim rights to. Such as you're webpages (Which I might add you get a pathetic amount of space for anyway) and if you're hosting on an Xtra server, theres probably nothing there worth taking.

Also, you're emails which are stored on their server until you download them. It is already common practice amongst many ISPs to read and look at incoming emails. Either officially or unofficially, it happens.

Lets just face it. Nothings secure anymore.

Take this site for example. I am renting the use of the server but I own the content and all the files that make it up. Their change of policy is tantamount of intellectual property and copyright theft on a massive scale. I had to a class on copyright law in art school and as an artist I tend to care about the copyright law as it pertains to my work. Your average user does not know or care about it and that is a shame because it is because of this that POS TOS get written and bone head laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. But those are US laws not Kiwi.

Well, I just did some research into the New Zealand law pertaining to copyright. Heres what I came up with.

http://www.med.govt.nz/buslt/int_prop/info-sheets/copyright-prot.html

From that page:

'For a "work" or type of material to qualify for copyright protection, four conditions must generally be satisfied:

It must fall within one of the categories or subject matter in which copyright can exist;
It must be sufficiently "original";
The "author" must be a "qualified person"; and
Certain works must be fixed either in writing or some other material form. '

The prior examples of a Blog, or a web comic fit all of these. Below this excerpt is what mediums come under copyright protection. One of them (The top one I think) says that compilations, including compilations of data are protected. This would probably be taken to include a compilation of posts (Blog) or a compilation of images (Web Comic).

'Under the Act, copyright protection comes into existence automatically upon the creation of any original work.'

At a glance this new policy of Xtras seems to breech the New Zealand copyright law. However, because when I sign up with Xtra I agree to their terms and services, I may forfeit my protection under the copyright act.

Just as a side note, looking back through my junk mail I received an email from Xtra informing me of this change and telling me if I didnt agree I had until whatever date to stop using their service.

Either way, Ive got a law lecture coming up in 3 hours, so if I remember Ill have a talk to my lecturer afterwards about this. See what she says.

Well I had a talk to my Law Lecturer, and it seems that by using Xtras service you implicitly agree to their Terms of Service.

Now were I in the UK, I would be able to use the Unfair Terms and Conditions Act to tell Xtra they cant do this. However, seeing as Im in New Zealand and not in the UK it seems we dont have an equivalent.

So from a legal perspective, Xtra is perfectly in the right doing this. If you agree to their Terms of Service agreement (which most people dont read) and then upload content onto their servers, they can do whatever they want with it.

Unfortunate, but thats the way it goes I suppose.