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Amazon Web Services terms of use: run far away, run fast
- godzillabrennus 10y agoIt'd be interesting to see a resource created and dedicated to evaluating cloud service terms of use.
- kristjan 10y agohttps://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/
- jonaf 10y agoSo.. If Amazon is capable of this, why haven't they done it? In fact, instead, they have been purchasing companies (OpsWorks used to be a product by a third party company; can't get reference on a phone at the moment). This makes me believe that Amazon knows this clause is unenforceable or that they would lose in court if they tried to act on it.
- bkanber 10y agoNot a lawyer, but I think the reason Amazon did this is to prevent themselves against Oracle vs Google type issues. Alternatively, it could prevent attacks against AWS packaging popular software like Node or Wordpress in their offerings. One day Node might get upset at being repackaged and sold on AWS as part of Lambda or whatever (dunno if this is accurate but you get the idea), and Amazon wants to protect themselves against being sued in the future for that type of packaging.
- jon-wood 10y agoThis wouldn't actually help in the case of Node becoming upset about Amazon using their code. The agreement is between the AWS customer and Amazon - Node's owners aren't party to it. Besides which, Node's licence expressly grants permission to build commercial products on top of it.
- spdionis 10y agoOpsworks used to be called Scalarium.
- ramenmeal 10y agoDo these ridiculous ToS/ToU hold up in court?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoTheir reading of that quote is extremely strange. All that quote says is "you won't sue us for your use of AWS, or claim you own AWS's IP." Seems like a standard and obvious clause. I don't see where it says: > With this clause, Amazon could quite literally copy any of it's customers' software, and their brands, that Amazon hosts on and displays from its servers, fold that into its Amazon Web Services offering, and call it a day. What? That isn't what it says at all. In fact it limits the scope of the claim to "Service Offerings" which is rigidly defined. The author seems to be struggling to read legalese and is misinterpreting it.
- bkanber 10y agoI think the author is making the claim that AWS could add any new product to their Service Offerings at any time (they can) and that Amazon _could_ clone a customer's IP and add it as a Service Offering on AWS, and this clause would prevent the customer from suing. I also disagree that this is the correct interpretation, or that this is an issue at all, but I believe that's the author's reading.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWell, isn't there some precedent? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973
- an_account 10y agoThat's not precedent because they aren't cloning products that are patented and they aren't cloning IP. All they're doing in that case is making a competitive product.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoAgreed, but sure is ruffling feathers. And makes them seem not very trustworthy.
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- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- draugadrotten 10y ago> With this clause, Amazon could quite literally copy any of it's customers' software, and their brands, that Amazon hosts on and displays from its servers, fold that into its Amazon Web Services offering, and call it a day. What leads the blogging Sean to say something like that? Admittedly, English is not my first or even second language, but the way I read the quoted paragraph, Amazon talks only about their own IP, the Amazon AWS Service Offering and "any other product or service" provided by Amazon. Where do they talk about the super secret IP created by Sean Hogle?
- gohrt 10y agoIs it common for licensed lawyers to publicly post legally suspect, grammatically incorrect advice? Does that not fall squarely under malpractice, the sort of thing that lawyers usually disclaim with "IANYL"?
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoFWIW, the author of that blog is a law firm that specializes in intellectual property.
- donpark 10y agoUnless I'm mistaken, 'protection' goes beyond AWS to include "any of our affiliates, customers, vendors, business partners, or licensors." This effectively creates a safe harbor against not only trolls but also legit patent holders who foolishly decide to use AWS.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoThe claim is that you agree not to sue Amazon for IP violations, so they could do whatever they want and an honest man constrained by his code of honor to never break any agreement would be powerless to stop them. Genies and devils would also have no recourse. Most concerned users on this site are startup founders or CTOs, who aren't likely to have a code of honor of any sort except for marketing purposes. So it's worth asking what the punishment is for breaking the agreement and suing them anyways. The punishment for violating the agreement is that they can shut off your service and tell you to go away in 30 days. So my reading is that if Amazon stole your Redshift-competitor and you sued them for copyright infringement: * You'd win the lawsuit, because you never gave them a license to use your code. * You'd be blackballed from AWS, banned from either using AWS or working for anyone who uses AWS. You'd have 30 days to move your product to Google Cloud or Azure. Which seems reasonable to me.
- spdustin 10y agoWhat a horribly wrong post. First off, I'm confident that many big-boy lawyers have been over those terms with a fine-toothed comb, so I wanted to lead with that, since I'm not a big-boy lawyer myself. All emphasis is mine. 1) Section 3.2 on data privacy makes it clear: "We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings" [or if legally and lawfully compelled] Full stop. I shouldn't have to go on to number two. 2) Section 8.1: "As between you and us, you or your licensors own all right, title and interest in and to Your Content" Full stop again. It's pretty clear. But, hey, there's a dead horse over there, and he looks like he needs a beatin'... 3) Same section: "[with exceptions noted later] we obtain no rights under this Agreement from you our your licensors to Your Content, including intellectual property rights" But let's go directly to his quoted section. 4) "You will not assert ... against us ... any patent infringement or any other intellectual property infringement claim regarding any Service Offerings you have used" So, if it's not clear: you can't sue Amazon claiming that Simple Storage Service (S3) comprised a patent violation. You can't sue Amazon saying that they're violating your intellectual property rights when they serve your web page from an edge cache in Zimbabwe. They've already stated unequivocally in prior sections that they assert ZERO rights to your code/images/markup/etc ("Your Content"). How is this person practicing law?
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoIf you build a server monitoring service running on EC2 that has some aspect that is patented, could AWS incorporate that feature into EC2? update: emphasized patented
- grogenaut 10y agoIf you don't have a patent on the technique and AWS doesn't directly copy your code do you even have a claim? I would think not or netflix would be suing amazon. Or maybe they have and netflix gets a super duper special rate.
- spdustin 10y ago"...we obtain no rights under this Agreement from you our your licensors to Your Content, including intellectual property rights..." They could clean-room re-engineer it. So could anybody else. But, no, they could not simply take your monitoring code because they disclaimed having ANY intellectual property rights to it already. Saying "as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings" covers hosting and backups. After all, your code, patented or not, is not necessary to maintain or provide their Service Offerings; their Service Offerings were already being maintained and provided.
- mechaman44 10y agoWhat happened to the site? I can't access it... Is it still up?
- kep1122 10y agohere is the text. Skip to Main Content Home Home Sean Hogle blog staff contact Amazon Web Services terms of use: run far away, run fast 11 June 2016 Amazon sells Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collection of cloud-hosting services. Amazon promotes AWS as a way for companies to secure computing capacity quickly and economically, eliminating the need to purchase and maintain physical servers. Thousands of companies, including traditional mainline businesses, internet startups and technology ventures, use AWS to host their software and brands on Amazon servers, including Comcast, Siemens, Reddit and Netflix. The AWS Customer Agreement (http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/) contains an IP non-assertion clause that is breathtaking in its reach: "During and after the Term, you will not assert, nor will you authorize, assist, or encourage any third party to assert, against us or any of our affiliates, customers, vendors, business partners, or licensors, any patent infringement or other intellectual property infringement claim regarding any Service Offerings you have used." "Service Offerings" are defined as AWS, "(including associated APIs)", the "AWS Content" (which includes software), the "AWS Marks" (which are any marks that Amazon uses now or in the future), and "any other product or service" provided by Amazon under this agreement. With this clause, Amazon could quite literally copy any of it's customers' software, and their brands, that Amazon hosts on and displays from its servers, fold that into its Amazon Web Services offering, and call it a day. Each of Amazon's customers has essentially granted to Amazon, and to all of Amazon's customers, vendors, and partners, the equivalent of an unlimited royalty-free IP license, forever, to all the software, content, brands and technology that Amazon hosts for them. An extensive discussion about this matter and sample contract language (with redlined variations) are available at Redline (redline.net): http://redli.ne/1UIRlO7 http://redli.ne/1UIRlO7. Sean Hogle's blog notices log in © 2006, 2016 Sean Hogle PC. All rights reserved.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dctoedt 10y agoI posted this link and am surprised to see that it's been flagged. Sean Hogle's interpretation is not at all unreasonable. (I've been an IP lawyer for longer than I care to admit, and I teach a law-school course in contract drafting.) In particular: 1. A court would try to interpret the AWS TOS so as to give effect to all of its provisions. 2. Of the provisions that spdustin cites, [0] the important one says: "We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings ...." (Emphasis added.) 3. I can easily imagine an edge-case scenario: Suppose hypothetically that [i] Amazon's engineers decided that they wanted to borrow an idea or technique or method from a customer's code for use in the AWS feature set, and [ii] they came up with arguments why doing so was supposedly "necessary" to "maintain" or "provide" the Service Offerings. 4. The question would then arise: Does the term "maintain or provide the Service Offerings" encompass the making of improvements to them? Many would say "no," but that would most assuredly not be a slam dunk. Here are two arguments I would make in favor of "yes": A. I haven't taken the time to look, but I would bet money that the term "Service Offering" is defined so that it encompasses AWS's future features as they're developed, not just the existing feature set. This would support the argument that "necessary ... to provide the Service Offerings" encompasses using Your Content to further develop the Service Offerings. B. Enterprise-software customers usually buy maintenance as well as licenses. Traditionally, as long as you're on maintenance, you're entitled to whatever upgrades the vendor releases during your maintenance period. A court would almost certainly consider that as weighing in favor of saying that the term "maintain ... the Service Offerings" encompasses further development. Both A and B above would weigh in favor of interpreting Section 3.2, cited by spdustin, as expressly authorizing Amazon to use Your Content in doing further development of the AWS feature set. Arguments A and B wouldn't be a slam dunk either, in part because of the contra proferentem principle of contract interpretation, which says that other things being equal, an ambiguous contract provision will be construed in favor of the party that didn't draft the provision [1]. But it'd be an expensive proposition for an AWS subscriber to try to duke it out with Amazon on that point. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889449 [1] http://www.commondraft.org/index.html#ContraProf http://www.commondraft.org/index.html#ContraProf
- Tiquor 10y agoThe post author has a reading comprehension problem.