Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

Heck, this is very easy to google:

https://www.quora.com/If-you-ask-a-lawyer-to-draft-a-contrac...

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24521/are-the-indivi...

https://www.upcounsel.com/are-contracts-copyrighted

Contracts are text and text is subject to copyright. You seem to be confused about the difference between copyright, patents and trademarks though. That copyright applies to contracts does not mean it's possible for two different lawyers to end up writing almost identical contracts. It instead means it's very difficult to demonstrate copyright infringement based on the text alone. But if you simply copy a contract verbatim that you demonstrably had access to and can't demonstrate how you arrived at the exact same wording (e.g. if you're a layperson and have never written a contract before), it's probably an easy case for the copyright holder to win.

This will apparently blow your mind but in some jurisdictions outside the US such as the EU, mere collections of facts ("databases") are also protected by copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

Note that this does not mean you can't collect the same facts, it just means you can't harvest them from an existing collection and reproduce them the same way. So you couldn't just publish your own knock-off white pages phone book but you could publish a phone book as long as it is not sourced from an existing one. Please remember: this does not apply in US copyright law.

You can replace "garage" with whatever you want. Basically, if I'm a contractor I can sue every other contractor for uncreative derivative works. If I'm installing garages, I can sue my competitors. If I'm selling software, I can sue my competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

Even if it doesn't succeed 100% of the time, there is a non-zero chance people will settle. There's a non-zero chance that I can prevent other people from creating businesses in my market by simply writing every potential variation of some common contract elements.

That's why this is absurd that contracts can be copyrighted. You can argue that you'd have to prove intent, but people do that every day with news stories and win (I have a reporter friend that has been sued multiple times for 'copying stories' that they themselves wrote -- they win most of the time. In one case, I was sitting right beside him on the train while he wrote the story from his interview notes. The 'plaintive' tends to create a verbatim story on the web and change the publish date to some date in the past, then 'proves' they wrote it first. They don't win, but they do cause stories to be 'redacted' until it can be proven one way or the other. By then though, the news is old news.)

If I understand your example correctly, you would take an existing SaaS's ToS (i.e. copy their copyrighted work), publish it as your own (i.e. lie) and then file a DMCA takedown request (i.e. commit perjury) to force them to remove their ToS? Yes, you could do that. But since you likely can't demonstrate that you're the original copyright holder (e.g. trivially their SaaS pre-dates your service and they probably have internal documents like e-mails surrounding the drafting of the ToS whereas you don't unless you forge those as well) and sending a DMCA takedown request for works you don't actually own is literally a felony crime, I don't think that's a winning strategy.

To be clear: yes, there are laws against abusing DMCA takedown requests, precisely because otherwise anyone could just send them out for fun. Specifically DMCA takedown requests include a statement under penalty of perjury from the copyright holder that they hold the copyright. So this isn't a special DMCA law but just a boring old felony crime involved in fraudulently filing illegitimate legal claims.

If you're wondering why you've never heard of this it's probably because you're thinking of sites like YouTube which don't actually receive DMCA takedown requests normally but instead provide an arbitration system to allow content owners to avoid messy legal back-and-forths over the back of Google and instead be trusted based on who they are (i.e. smaller creators will be stuck in appeals limbo trying to talk to a human whereas large corporations will usually be trusted by default). This does not however apply to e.g. GitHub, which is why there is a public collection of DMCA takedown requests hosted by them: https://github.com/github/dmca

To speed up this conversation: if you can think of another example where your conclusion is "but this is dumb" then it's likely because your example is, not the legal situation you're looking at. Also "but this is dumb" is not a counter-argument to "this is what the law is like". The law does not care if you think it is dumb and saying it is dumb is not a good defense if you end up in court.

Anyone with some knowledge of history can see what horrible things might happen if we build a comprehensive surveillance machine, but nothing terrible has happened yet. It’s hard to convince people to give up convenience to prevent a danger that hasn’t yet come and cannot be clearly seen.

With climate change it will take years of records for extreme weather being blown away. For this it might take a developed nation falling into hard core fascism and the digital dragnet being turned directly against its citizenry.

China is perhaps a case with its social credit system and camps, but it might not be extreme enough and may be too far away. It may have to happen here, or much worse. Americans in particular think “it can’t happen here” even though it almost has several times.