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Text File
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1994-09-11
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130 lines
CLARINEWS TERMS FOR PUBLIC ACCESS SITES AND BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS
Normally, ClariNet sells directly to end-users or to corporations and
educational institutions that have end-users as their members or
employees. We are not permitted to sell to people who in turn resell
the information to their customers, at least not with most of what we
publish.
However, we have a special exemption which allows us to sell to the
smaller public access sites which compete on a small scale with the
online services of the world. Such sites aren't big enough to maintain
their own electronic news service or buy directly from newswires and
other sources, so the sources let us sell to them under special terms.
In addition, access to our news by dial-up link is not nearly as nice
as access on your own "home" system, where home system means a machine
that's on your desk or to which you have a LAN connection. However,
the extra layer of selling removes the material further away from the
control of the wires, which they are concerned about.
We call you a BBS if you sell accounts to outsiders. Thus the term
also includes public access Unix systems, internet access providers
and so on. (You're also a BBS if you give accounts to outsiders in a
significant way, but frankly, our product, inexpensive as it is, is
not priced to be affordable by free BBSs.)
Our base product is available at a monthly cost of .40 cents per
active user on your BBS. (An active user is somebody who has logged on
in the last two months.) The base product includes Newsbytes, the
syndicated features, San Francisco Bay Area news from the Bay City
News Service, some other minor news products, and AP Bulletin Line, a
special version of AP Online for BBSs. APBL, as we abbreviate it,
contains the full sports, weather and entertainment coverage of AP
Online, but only summaries of general, international and business
news. An hourly summary of the top stories is included in this.
Free users are not included in this count, so long as they have no
access to ClariNet material. If your BBS has a free side there for
publicity purposes, we don't need to count it. (However, as you'll see
below, the payment of a fee has to provide the paying user with lots
more than our service.)
When we sell this package, it is priced based on the entire paying
population of the BBS. We know not everybody is going to read it. We
can't really price it at 40 cents per actual reader, but because most
systems have no wish to do actual account administration and access
control, while paying a much higher price per activated user, this
scheme works out well.
It has to go to every paying user on the system. If you have "tiers"
or "premium levels" on your system, you can make ClariNet available
only to premium users, but the premium level has to exist for much
more than access to ClariNet. A typical premium level gives users more
free online hours, access to the shell or other special system
features, and possibly ClariNet. The premimum level must also include
at least 25% of your total user base. In this case, you can pay based
only on the population of the premium level.
Our model of the BBS is the traditional one -- a system with a number
of dial-up lines where people call with a modem, and read messages in
an interactive session. That's not a perfect model anymore, so below
we describe how to make newer systems fit that model.
The expected users of such a service are dial-up users, who contact
your system via a modem, either by direct dial-up or dial-up to the
public access nodes of a packet network such as Compuserve's or
Sprint's. To use our service as a BBS, such people should constitute
the vast bulk of your system's users. In addition, users should be
expected to read our material online, or to download only a smattering
of it for offline reading. If they download a large array of
newsgroups, this is a feed to a remote (single-user) site, and they
need to buy a single user site licence from us. Users who establish a
SLIP or PPP connection to your via a dial-up modem and then use an
NNTP based newsreaders can be considered the same as those who
establish an interactive modem session and run a newsreader resident
on your machine.
In all cases, your users should be informed of our terms for the
information, and in particular you should notify them that the
information is for their personal use only. It is not to be copied or
distributed to others, and it is most definitely not to be used by any
traditional media such as newspapers (including college newspapers),
TV, radio etc. Our information providers are quite serious about the
latter case, and we can be forced to cut off your board if it is found
that a radio station or other news agency is using our feed on your
BBS for their own editorial purposes.
Finally, this service is primarily for sites that offer dial-up
access. It is not available for sites which receive the bulk of their
calls via telnet or NNTP over the internet. You can have users who
telnet in, but they should be only a small minority of your
population.
As you might guess, we do not sell BBS licences to "corporate" BBSs --
special systems for in-house use. They must pay regular corporate
rates.
The extra services -- full AP Online and our full Reuters feed - are
also available, however, the wires have insisted that the price be
very high.
Reuters news is available for $1 extra per user on the BBS, so the
price for the Base + Reuters is $1.40 per user.
AP Online is available at a minimum of $5,000 per month, for up to
10,000 users. This covers all your users.
The high AP Online cost obviously is only possible for the largest
systems, and we appreciate that. The Reuters cost can be managed with
premium levels. As noted before, if you have a premimum level that
qualifies for the base product, you can count only users in the
premium level.
You can also make the base product available to all users, and Reuters
available only to users at a premium level. If the premium level is
full of other features as before, the price is $1 extra per premium
user. There is a minimum of 200 premium users.
If the premium level is primarily for access to Reuters, the cost is
$2.50 extra per premium user, with a minimum of 100 premium users.
If you wish to carry all the services, or your system is very large,
contact us to work out something for your special needs. If you don't
carry all the services, however, you may not advertise that your
system has a full ClariNet feed. Your users and prospects must be
aware that it is only a partial ClariNet feed.
July 11, 1994