37signals launched a bulk sub­scrip­tion suite for their apps a cou­ple of days ago. In the launch announce­ment I noticed that they refer to users as own­ing their apps:

Currently the 37signals Suite is only avail­able for peo­ple who already own a Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire account. If you own any one of these apps you can upgrade to the Suite in less than 60 sec­onds. We will be offer­ing the abil­ity to sign up for the Suite from scratch down the road, but we just don’t know when yet. Note: If you don’t own one of our prod­ucts yet, and you’d like to pur­chase the Suite, just sign up for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire and then fol­low the upgrade instruc­tions above. (empha­sis mine)

Despite the fact that you pay a monthly fee to use those apps 37signals says users own the prod­uct. They back this up by allow­ing a func­tional HTML or XML export of most con­tent at any time.

Compare that to Twitter, whose Terms of Service say “what’s yours is yours – you own your con­tent.” Sounds sim­i­lar right? Too bad Twitter does not pro­vide a way to export more than 3200 tweets.