Orkut's terms of service state:
By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.
This does not mean that any contribution to the Orkut community (be it forum posts or photos) becomes the property of the site owner; while it means that Orkut can use any submitted information for any purpose, the original submitter doesn't lose any rights to his materials.
Although other popular social network services such as Friendster and MySpace contain similar statements, this policy offended many dedicated Orkut users, some of whom deleted their accounts as a protest.
Iranian censorship
Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is now blocked by the government. As they say, this is due to national security issues, as Orkut users have the ability to spread messages rapidly, but the government says it's due to Islamic ethical issues about dating and match making. To get around this block, sites such as "orkutproxy.com" (now defunct) were made for Iranian users. Other websites such as Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups have communities dedicated to receiving updates on the newest location of Iran's Orkut proxy. Though it was once possible to bypass governmental blockage of Orkut, the site has closed its HTTPS pages on all anonymous proxies. Now it is almost impossible for ordinary users to visit this site inside Iran.
In August 2006, United Arab Emirates followed the footsteps of Iran in blocking the site. This block was subsequently removed in October 2006
Saudi Arabia is another country that has blocked access to Orkut.
Jail
Users who misbehaved or were reported to misbehave could be "jailed". Their account was suspended, their site access was reasonably limited, and their profile picture was temporarily replaced with a silhouette of a man behind prison bars. Although this served a useful purpose, the way users were selected to be jailed caused heated discussions and complaints among Orkut users: every user's profile has a "Report as Bogus" button, which, if pressed, automatically flagged the user to be jailed. Conceivably, this means that anyone could be jailed at any time by pressing a single button.
Another way to be jailed was to have a bot-like behaviour. To safeguard against bots and similar kinds of software automations, users who added friends or joined communities in a very quick or repetitive manner were automatically put in jail. However, this also often happened to new users trying to add all their friends at once.
Users who were jailed were not informed of the reason, nor were they notified that they had been jailed. Jailing usually did not last long (up to 24 hours in most cases), but was often disturbing to users, as there is no direct contact to the Orkut team (their contact form only answers with template emails), and jailing limits one's options to waiting or posting in a designated forum. Ironically, site users once reported that Orkut Büyükkökten, the creator of the site himself, was jailed. The jail system is currently deactivated due to its inefficiency. Now when someone clicks on the "Report as Bogus" button, he is directed to a complaint form entitled "flag for review", where he is able to provide further details about the abuse he is reporting.
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