At the risk of sounding like a nitwit, is AOL’s assertion in the TOS even legal ? If I greet you when you walk into my house and say “Hi, Mark, lovely to see you–walking through the door means that anything you say, I own the rights to. I can use your image…etc and you have to clean the kitchen” and you then walk through my door, does it follow that I actually have those rights?

I don’t think so. I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t believe their assertion. I mean–if we modified GPL to say ‘use grants right for any citizen of Canada anywhere to borrow your car indefinitely’ I don’t think it would hold up.

Reductio only goes so far, anyway…although probably doesn’t go at all with AOL’s lawyers.

If Skype will get this madness as well, what _can_ we do?

Surely if this continues there are going to be times when more than one corporate entity is trying to claim rights to the same parts of us at the same time. That part might be interesting. If there were a big enough fight, they could make asses of themselves properly, with a big audience.