Twitter: By submitting, posting or displaying Content.. you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute...
Bluesky: If you post any content.. you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensees a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, sublicense, and distribute..
@mastodonmigration
Curious from a technical/legal standpoint; if I don't grant these rights, how can any kind of web platform, mastodon included, take the content I produce and let other people see it in their web browsers?
@mastodonmigration This clause exists because you have to give a licence to your content in order for them to show it at all, and on a federated system you have to give a sublicence so that they can send it to other instances.
This is extremely normal, since otherwise there's no ability to, you know, distribute the content
@aurynn What they are getting with process and modify is much broader than reformatting, resizing and translating. What they are after and what they are getting is the legal right to consume your content and use the results to build a profile of you that can be put into their algorithm and also sold to ad tech companies to determine what ads should be placed alongside your content. If that is what you mean by "etc." then I guess we are in agreement.
@aurynn The problem is that it is not so limited. In book publishing for example the rights are very clearly limited and the contract between the writer and publisher defines those limitations. It is entirely fine for social media users to grant permission via license for social media sites to show (reformat, distribute) their content and it is entirely possible to limit those rights, but that's not what they are doing. Users should understand what rights they are granting to these companies.
@aurynn Agree that it is a more nuanced issue. Disagree it is disingenuous to raise the matter. The Faustian bargain is that they give you free stuff and they get to consume your data and monetize it as they see fit. Users should understand what they are giving away and where in the terms of service they are giving up these rights. If they want to retain these rights to their content then they can choose a social media publisher that does not take them away as part of the deal.
@mastodonmigration It's disingenuous because all social media, including this fediverse that you are typing this on, has to have these clauses in order to comply with the fucked up copyright systems spread across the world.
@aurynn We seem to be in some agreement. There needs to be a clause, but it should be more limited. Question, as cloudisland.nz admin, what are your terms of service? Can not find anything at all for mastodon.online or mastodon.social. It would be really useful for this conversation to contrast the Mastodon license terms with Twitter and Bluesky, but can not find any terms for Mastodon.
@aurynn Which is a whole lot different from use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute. This is entirely the point. A user should be very comfortable with your license.
@mastodonmigration From this conversation I have to/probably should add those things now, since those things are happening as part of the technical system
@aurynn From this conversation it seems like Mastodon and the Fediverse need to not just wing it, but rather have recommended terms of service for instances that are not overly broad but give the instance the protections it needs without taking rights it does not require. In essence, a good contract. IANAL, but your terms seem fine. It would be very surprising if simply reformatting content were determined to be in violation.
"Content ownership
You retain the rights to any original content that you post on Blorbo.Social.
You grant us the right to publish and share the content in accordance with the post privacy options that you select."
Definitely not lawyer-tested! But I felt like it was enough of a statement of intent to (maybe?) cover us.
@lookitmychicken@aurynn Seems fine. It would definitely be good to have these things "lawyer tested." The distinction might lie in whether something is a transmission medium versus a publisher. For instance, an ISP does not need a license to your content since it is a transmission medium. If something wants to do something with your content that's where the license comes in. It would be very interesting to get a real copywrite/intellectual property lawyer to comment on this.
As @aurynn knows, some of us think that it's not disingenuous at all to worry about Mastodon posts by default allowing GET from anywhere on the Internet, and there is no straightforward way for users to specify the actual license that applies to any given post. I wrote about this at length: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search
Hey @mastodonmigration I think that's a bigger problem than the boilerplate legals that are currently felt to be required to allow posting at all.
Creators still have all of their rights. If they want to post exactly the same thing on another platform they can. If they want to collect them all and have them printed in a book they can.
An author with an existing contract for a book to be published can't just go and make another contract with a different publisher for the same market.
@simon_lucy@aurynn Depends on the publishing contract, but the publisher is generally not given the right to modify the content or process it for whatever purposes they want either. Just be aware of what you are giving Twitter and Bluesky when you hit post.
In order to publish they generally have to modify the content in terms of the font, layout, cover, there will usually be an editor that depending upon the relationship and history may suggest or even require changes made to the text.
When the content includes facts and assertions about individuals off legal entities there will usually be a legal and changes may be necessary.
In terms of marketing they will send out review copies, they will produce excerpts and they will try and place them with particular booksellers, arrange signings, readings.
And if you're really unfortunate you'll get a chapter from someone else's novel inserted at the end to market that book to the reader.
Those are all normal in mainstream contracts, sometimes the wording will be very broad because no one wants to decide all the detail or commit to everything upfront.
"Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products,
you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings)..."
@mastodonmigration but isn't this also true for mastodon? The system only works if everything can be used, reproduced, publicly displayed, modified (excerpt?), distributed. Don't really know about sublicensing
Why else did you post it? For them to hide it in a cupboard? You posted to a Mastodon instance for it to be published and also published on any other instance connected to it. That's the implied term.
@simon_lucy@haayman Should have been clearer. No Mastodon license to use, process and modify the content. Granting a license to publish is one thing, but what you are granting to Twitter and Bluesky is much broader than that.
@simon_lucy@haayman Not all contracts are the same. It depends on the fine print. You grant them whatever rights you have agreed to in their terms of service. It is necessary to grant them the right to publish and reproduce, but these terms are much broader, and give Twitter and Bluesky effectively unlimited rights to your content. That is not necessary.
They don't have unlimited rights because then they would be exclusive and they're not. The creator hasn't lost any rights they can publish it themselves in any other way.
Because they're so broad if one of these companies decided to use the content in ways that had nothing to do with the platform or normal use a user could take it to a court, and they would have to show material loss or damage.
@mastodonmigration the first thing to do when you write something that might put somebody in a bad light is to be well informed.
This topic has already been discussed on #Bluesky, the intent was that they could show promotional images, like in the App Store, without getting into problems.
The CEO of Bluesky, Jay, responded and welcomed further input to revise portions of the text.
It’s okay to be sharp on things, but make sure you do it with a honest intentions. And make sure to reach out.
@alastor8472 Do not really care what they say the intent is, it is what is in the agreement that matters, and what is in the agreement is a full non-exclusive license of your content to their company for all the purposes listed.
@alastor8472 It would certainly be possible for them to narrow the scope of the license to just those things you mention, but they do not do so. The fact that the CEO asked for help in revising these terms is silly and further calls into question their good faith, as they certainly have the legal resources to do so without outside "suggestions."
@mastodonmigration I don’t know but to me this sounds like an odd spin on something positive: responding, welcoming input, and potential future revisions.
Bluesky is a startup company, and like anyone bound to make mistakes.
@mastodonmigration To be fair, this sort of thing is present in the TOS for pretty much any site that allows user generated content.
This gives said companies permission to display content that users submitted to their site to other users. It also legally allows for things like user uploaded PFPs and banners, scaling/positioning of said images to fit a page's layout, etc.
The user is not giving ownership of any images, videos, etc. to the company/group that owns the site by agreeing to this.
@NeedlousWorm Nope. The words are the words. It is a legal agreement. While you retain ownership of your content, you are giving them a full non-exclusive license to your content for the purposes cited. Which is pretty much anything.
@mastodonmigration Again, that clause is simply the user, the owner of the content, agreeing to give said companies permission to display and store said content on their websites.
If they want to do something like train A.I., sell user data, etc., they have to explicitly state so in the TOS. (ex: Deviantart's TOS has a dedicated section regarding the training of their A.I. image generator).
The last time that section of Twitter's TOS, "Content on the Services," was modified was in 2018.
@mastodonmigration This is, sadly, not all that unusual for any "user-generated" content site. If you post reviews on Goodreads or Amazon, you're also giving them full rights to do with it whatever they want.
@michaeljpdx@mastodonmigration The difference is that you write your feedback especially for Amazon, you don't post art or professional photography etc. which is misused by platforms.
I swear we as a people would sign over our lives if it meant we were given the illusion of convenience. It doesn't even have to be real convenience; just the illusion of it would suffice.
@jay Maybe, except this was supposed to be a decentralized network. Why are users of a decentralized system supposed to give license to all their content to a single central organization?
I'm not saying anyone is supposed to give license to anyone for any reason. I'm simply saying that almost every business that has a web presence online has those same rules in their usage agreements, so it doesn't surprise me.
@jay This would be similar as if Mastodon had a license agreement saying if you use the software, you must give Mastodon gGmbh a license to all the content you post using it.
Nobody would use Mastodon in that case, because such a thing wouldn't make any sense.
@vurpo If Mastodon was a for-profit company, they would have those provisions in place. People would still use Mastodon regardless, just like they currently use Twitter, Google and anything else that use the same provisions in their agreements.
@jay The fundamental difference is that "decentralized system" and "to use this system you must license all your content to this centralized entity" are not compatible. You can have one or the other but not both, and Bluesky seems to claim they want both at the same time?
@vurpo I don't see how they are not compatible, but okay.
Essentially, I read this as "if your data hits our servers, we can do what we want with it". I suppose you would have to block federation with Bluesky servers to avoid it, but I know nothing about how it works so I have no idea if that's possible, etc...
@jay The text reads not as "if you want to use our server, you need to follow our rules" but actually as "if you want to use our decentralized social media at all, you need to follow these rules"
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