The Final Word from Xing–And It’s Good!

One day after Xing’s not-terribly-satisfactory preliminary response to my original letter, I got this from Xing:

Thanks again for your email. I am glad to have more feedback for you regarding your inquiry. Our Terms & Conditions are designed for an audience of millions and are, for this reason, very general. I would be happy to clarify Clause 12 for you.

A XING member absolutely always has full rights to every article that he or she posts on XING. Members have the right, of course, to publish anything that they post on XING on any other medium they chose. You would, for example, have the full right to post something that you wrote on XING on your own blog.

Furthermore, XING would never use articles posted on XING without the authors’ permission. If XING, for example, were to publish a book about groups that includes forum articles, we would contact the author to ask for their permission and, of course, would not publish their work if we did not receive their permission.

Finally, the reason why this Clause is in our Terms & Conditions is to avoid the situation in which a member who cancels their membership demands us to return, in hard copy, all of their group posts and/or erase them from the platform. While a member has the right to work with a group moderator or with a Community Relations member to erase their posts, we ask, in general, that posts remain on XING even after a member is no longer with us.

I hope this answers your questions. Please let me know if anything is unclear and I can provide more feedback.

Regards,
XING-Team

And this is exactly what I was hoping for. Now I can post away, knowing that I have a paper trail showing the integrity of my rights ownership.

Bravo! And hmmm, maybe they’ll reword it to cover what they really need without appearing to make a rights grab.

Those links to the two previous posts again:

My original letter (and the overall context)