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Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

mwl.io

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Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#31

Post by HillRat »

wrs wrote: post #16
HillRat wrote: post #4

If you've ever been involved in ToS drafting, you're used to customers panicking over clauses that you and your attorneys crafted to deal with pretty standard business requirements, such as granting adaptation rights so you can create thumbnails or summaries of user-generated content, for example. This ... is not that. This is facially overbroad, lacks any kind of even indicative usage limitations, and likely breaks…

“Training” in these things comes across differently than it did two years ago (i.e., employee training)! And what is “modeling” supposed to mean? This actually reads much like the typical internet ToS of 20 years ago, before it became standard to say “only as needed to provide the specific services” because people started rightfully freaking out. Especially in the media world with its history of repeatedly bilking ar…

That's one thing -- if you took a contract signed ten years ago that granted "training" rights and tried to use that for "AI training," a judge would likely find that customary business usage has changed in that time and there was no "meeting of the minds" to support a grant of AI training rights. Take that same language and sign a contract with it today ... different story. (Interesting question for contract lawyers: if you take the contract from a decade ago and execute it today, does the usage at the time of contract drafting control, or the usage at signing? One would assume time of signing, but for an adhesion contract that might not have undergone substantive changes I think there's an interesting argument that the interpretation most favorable to the signer controls. Probably some case law out there addressing this.)

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#32

Post by thimp »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #9

This is tangential, but the author's audiobook "Savaged by Systemd" sounds hilariously bizarre: > The classic work of Linux satirical erotica, complete and unabridged, now a Tilted Windmill Press exclusive! > ... The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init. > So Systemd comes for Terry. > Wearing skin-tight leather pants.

Is it a love story? Is it a horror story? We will never know!

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#33

Post by fnimick »

jijijijij wrote: post #25
torlok wrote: post #14

You definitively should do that, but I doubt that it will prevent your data from being trained on. It sucks, but that's the reality now. I stopped using Spotify a while ago. Never using it again for sure.

What's your alternative? I enthusiastically do not care for podcasts, news and social "features". Recommendation for a just (all the) music, no shenanigans type of service?

youtube music? (plus ad-free youtube is included which is always nice)

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#34

Post by xanderlewis »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #9

This is tangential, but the author's audiobook "Savaged by Systemd" sounds hilariously bizarre: > The classic work of Linux satirical erotica, complete and unabridged, now a Tilted Windmill Press exclusive! > ... The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init. > So Systemd comes for Terry. > Wearing skin-tight leather pants.

That's brilliant.

...not entirely related, but reminds me of this: https://wiki.wlug.org.nz/POSIX_ME_HARDER).

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#35

Post by aaronbrethorst »

ufo wrote: post #27
neuronexmachina wrote: post #9

This is tangential, but the author's audiobook "Savaged by Systemd" sounds hilariously bizarre: > The classic work of Linux satirical erotica, complete and unabridged, now a Tilted Windmill Press exclusive! > ... The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init. > So Systemd comes for Terry. > Wearing skin-tight leather pants.

Sounds like something Chuck Tingle would write.

Pounded in the root by a Systemd

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#36

Post by SoftTalker »

naitgacem wrote: post #6

I wonder how much of the highlighted clause you hereby grant Spotify a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, fully paid, irrevocable, worldwide license to reproduce, make available, perform and display, translate, modify, create derivative works from (such as transcripts of User Content), distribute, and otherwise use any such User Content through any medium is actually necessary for the service t…

> I wonder how much ... is actually necessary for the service to function in the first place.

Probably more than you might think. IANAL but the general operation of Spotify-like service, which I'd summarize as "making creative content digitally available to any user, anywhere in the world, on demand" requires a lot of that.

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#37

Post by autoexec »

naitgacem wrote: post #6

I wonder how much of the highlighted clause you hereby grant Spotify a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, fully paid, irrevocable, worldwide license to reproduce, make available, perform and display, translate, modify, create derivative works from (such as transcripts of User Content), distribute, and otherwise use any such User Content through any medium is actually necessary for the service t…

The lack of that kind of clause resulted in a lot of shows having to replace all the music they'd licensed when they later tried to release their works on VHS, DVD, and again on streaming services. A famous example being Daria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria) which ran on MTV and just used whatever songs were popular at the time. Licensing issues kept the show from being released on DVD for ages and when it finally did, it came with an apology letter explaining why all the songs had been replaced with generic music.

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#38

Post by dr_dshiv »

This is going to significantly disrupt market economies (capitalism). It’s increasingly hard to see how humans can get compensated or incentivized or paid in anyway — without some kind of AI tax that gets redistributed.

It seems like a good way to deal with the copyright infringement of current and future AI models — all revenue is taxed 10% for an endowment for the arts.

Is this a crazy idea?

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#39

Post by ziddoap »

ryandrake wrote: post #29
Fraterkes wrote: post #10

IANAL but this seems like a textbook example of the kinde of tos abuse that will not be enforcable. "If you click this checkbox you give us usage rights of your IP in perpetuity for free".

Isn't this kind of crap in basically every TOS though? These things are written by company counsel to be as one-sided as possible and to grab as much as possible. "We give ourselves the right to do anything we want, forever, worldwide, and permanently, and you waive everything you have, forever, permanently." Sprinkle in a severability clause, so that everything the company claims has to be litigated separately, and…

Terms of service are generally pretty shitty, yes. But this is egregiously shitty.

https://tosdr.org/ is a good site to compare. Any service over Grade E (Spotify, Facebook, the usual suspects are all Es) is (very likely to be) less bad. DeviantArt for example is a D, and doesn't include waiving your moral rights among some of the other overreach.

Some service terms are actually quite good (DuckDuckGo, Mullvad, off the top of my head). Though these aren't content sharing platforms so it's not really as fair of a comparison.

Re: Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable

#40

Post by [deleted] »

hash872 wrote: post #26
sneak wrote: post #2

I'm waiting for these sorts of unilateral "we have updated our terms of service, by doing nothing, you agree to these new terms" contractual edicts get eliminated as a whole class of behavior. I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure if it stops when enough of them get invalidated in court, or ifwhen the legislature steps in. It's insane that it's accepted as normal that someone can send you an email with notice of a contrac…

Agreed. Here's my question (because I'm assuming Spotify's ToS also includes mandatory arbitration): What happens if you try to challenge insanely overbroad terms in arbitration? Because you almost certainly signed away your right to sue. I'm not super-worked up about attorneys putting the most restrictive language that they can in a contract, knowing that in 'real' court a judge will simply throw a bunch of it out f…

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