I’m about to get attacked, but bear with me.

Conference organizers want your slides when you give a talk, mostly because attendees want slides, often because you put way too much information in them. That’s fine and understandable. Conference organizers would also probably rather be running conferences than building huge content management systems that allow nice uploading of slide decks in various formats (power point, keynote, open office, that crazy thing Derick & Rasmus use, etc).

Sites like Slideshare and Thinkfree seem like great solutions, the software issue is solved, decks can be tagged appropriately, linking things is easy. As an added bonus the content will even be available the next year, despite the current war on last year’s conference information (just try and find my speakers bio from any past conference without using google cache or archive.org).

My problem is with the terms of service that these sites use, or to be more accurate, the fact that I’ve neither read nor agreed to those terms of service.

Here’s a section of the terms of service from Thinkfree:

Publishing and Sharing Content
The user has the right to publicize or not to publicize their own contents. By publicizing the Contents, the user acknowledges and agrees that anyone using this Web site can and may use the Contents without restrictions.
From time to time, publicized Contents can be used by ThinkFree at its own discretion.
In addition, the user can allow a specified user to access and collaborate on user-created Contents. ThinkFree is not responsible for any problems arising from users sharing or publishing Contents.

So if a helpful conference organizer uploads my slides to thinkfree, they’ve given thinkfree the right to use the content however they see fit. They’ve also given any site visitor the right to use those slides without restrictions. My legalese is rusty, but it sounds like: any site visitor or the company behind thinkfree can do with as they please, any content that’s uploaded and public.

I’m not comfortable with that. I don’t feel that I’ve granted such rights to conference organizers by handing them my slides. I also don’t feel like I have the right to grant those permissions myself: I often use stock photography in my presentations, stock photography that comes with limited terms. By uploading my slides to various sites you might even be exposing me to lawsuits.

So please, keep old sites around and link to the PDFs.

edit: corrected some grammar as per comment, thanks!