for any legal (or just knowledgable) folks on my flists

[kaigou]

[Site-name redacted since that's not the issue.]

I think I'm getting what they're saying, and I'm not sure I'm liking it, so maybe I'm missing something. What does the following mean, in real-world non-fancy terms? Or at least, what's your impression of what it (might) mean?

"By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") on or through the Services, you hereby grant to [site], a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Services or otherwise have the right to grant the license set forth in this section, and (ii) the posting of your Content on or through the Services does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of any Content posted by you to or through the Services."

Comments

[law_nerd]

Legal person here -- but not a specialist in IP law (I teach it, but I don't *do* it), and this ain't any kind of advice, much less legal advice...

I'd read that to say:

If you put stuff you've created on our site we have the right to do anything we want with it, including -- if we can figure out how -- making money off it.

We can let other people use it too (how one becomes a sub-licensee isn't clear, it may be that all users of the service are sub-licensees and therefore can use each others content ... or it could require separate contracts.)

We have to stop if you take your stuff and go home. (That is, of course, if they make it possible to take your stuff ... some social networking sites make it next to impossible to get all the info off of an account and shut it down.)

If you put stuff that someone else created onto our site, and the someone else comes after us. It's all your fault (not ours) and you have to pay anything they can dig out of you.

---

Or, in other words, a quite typically nasty out of the box contract that the site owners like 'cause it gives everything to them ... even though chances are they've no idea what exactly to do with "everything" once it's there.

[branchandroot]

*nods* What s/he said. The general purpose to which that kind of clause is /put/ is for a social media site to, let us say, display your public content on their home page or Latest page, or use it in advertising their site. This does not make the actual verbiage any less appalling, or open to abuse of all sorts. But that's the most common application of it, which is what soothes a lot of people enough to not protest the /actual/ rights it hands over to the service too hard.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

More or less what everybody else said, and with that same This Is Not Legal Advice proviso.

The thing here is, some of your instinct that something rational had to be going on is right: giving a service a non-exclusive right to display, reproduce, and transmit information that you post is necessary for the service to work the way you want it to. And maybe there's a similar argument for the use, adapt, translate, kind of language: if you own copyright in something, at least in the U.S., you own all those ancillary rights, and maybe there's an argument that the ability to run something through, say, Google Translate means that a service has to ask for a nonexclusive right to adapt, translate (or at least display translations) and so forth to be safe. But this goes further than I'd be comfortable with, at least without more by way of explanation or limitation. To some extent I suppose it's probably self-policing -- if, for example, this hypothetical company decided to adapt your funny story about a client meeting into a play and put it on Broadway, you could cut them off at the knees by pulling your material off the service. That, I'm speculating, would mean they'd need to kill that Broadway production (because sure, they had the license to do it, sort of, when they started, but now the license has terminated), at great cost to themselves. So probably they wouldn't do things like that. Unless they were banking on not getting caught.

The other part is indemnification for posting of what turns out to be illegal content. This kind of clause at least used to be standard in mainstream publishing contracts, and possibly is standard on the Web as well, but if it isn't it would be nice to see that dialed back a little too.