I signed up the other day for Akatoo after seeing an ad on facebook. The ad says “only students qualify for this online project which can pay over $25 per hour, serious inquiries only.” The ad directs here, requesting that you register for and try out Akatoo and see if you like it before signing up for the project.

So I registered, and I’ve taken a look around. The idea of the site is that members ask questions (any sort), and other members answer them. Then those answers are rated by the community so people can see at a glance what answers are most useful. By taking any of the above actions, users accrue points that add to their IKU (thus far I’ve been unable to find out if that actually stands for anything). There are constant promotions going on in which the leaders at the end of a certain time period can win iPod nanos or shuffles.

On the informational level, Akatoo is not bad. Browsing through, I answered a few questions whose answers I knew, and learned some things I didn’t know previously. Questions vary a lot in quality. Many are specific (”How does a silkworm make silk?”) while others address opinion and are intended to spark debate (”What are your morals, values, and ethics?”). Most questions do seem like they could be useful, though I wouldn’t be interested in the majority, but some are clearly inane.

The thing I’m wondering is what those running the service are getting from it. I’d like to think they really are trying to develop a compendium of knowledge for the good of humanity, but I’m guessing there’s something in it for them too. At the very least, unless they’re funding the contest prizes out of pocket, they need some source of income from the site. I haven’t advertising on the site, except for google ads by the sides of individual user answers. When you answer a question, you can allow such an ad to be placed and the profits donated to a charity of your choice. So unless they’re skimming off of those, it doesn’t look they’re taking in ad revenue.

However, a look into the Terms of Use reveals a possibility. Under the subhead “License Grant,” the terms state that:

• By posting a question or answer to the Service, you automatically grant Akatoo a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the post, or any part of it, alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees. Any deletion of a post by you will not limit the foregoing license grant.
• You further agree that Akatoo has the right to use, without any payment or accounting to you or others, any concepts, know-how or ideas that you post to the Service.

Maybe these is just the standard legalese cover-your-ass jargon that appears in such terms of use; not being a lawyer, I don’t know. And I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that you don’t own exclusive copyright on answers that you freely post in a public forum. But this section allows Akatoo to use your work for their own profit into eternity, in whatever form they like, without any attribution to you. And even if you post it and then decide you want to remove it from the site, Akatoo still has that same license. This seems a little worrisome to me.

Admittedly, most answers given on the site can be readily found already online with a quick google. Most of it is common knowledge (though I’ve found at least one instance of cut and paste plagiarism), in which case this license grant isn’t much of a problem. But I’d caution Akatoo users against posting anything original or anything that they don’t want to see republished in, say, the Complete Akatoo Encyclopedia twenty years from now