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> I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. ... The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "

> I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. ... The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content Cough, reddit. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1129247/reddit-ceo-says-microsoft-and-others-need-to-pay-to-search-the-site https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1129247/reddit-ceo-... Same mistake? Note that "AI training" has now made an appearance. Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place.

talldayo 2y ago
> Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reddit might not retain sole ownership, but they certainly seem to own a copy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without our written agreement: license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content; [...] By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  "Own a copy" doesn't mean anything here. They have a non-exclusive sublicensable license to use Your Content. They have no ownership at all of Your Content, and have no standing to do anything if someone commercially exploits it (except for content posted by Reddit itself). The individual comments/posts are copyrighted by the individual posters. To the extent that Reddit does not give you a sublicense to exploit the content, the individual posters would be the ones who could make a claim for copyright infringement. If you don't have an account, then you haven't agreed to the ToS. Indeed, you can visit e.g. https://old.reddit.com/new/.json https://old.reddit.com/new/.json to fetch the latest posts without ever even seeing a link to any terms of service, much less agreeing to any. If someone distributes that scraped data via torrent (they do), then (again, except for posts by Reddit staff) Reddit has nothing to say. They have no claim to that data.
  - gunapologist99 2y ago
    Agreed, except that those people who haven't agreed to the ToS also have no legitimate right to the work outside of a separate agreement with the publisher. Just putting it on Reddit doesn't make it fair game for everyone. Similarly, posting a news article to Facebook grants FB the same rights, more or less, but it doesn't grant Joe Random the right to re-publish the same article unless he makes an outside deal with the original author.

talldayo 2y ago

> Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reddit might not retain sole ownership, but they certainly seem to own a copy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without our written agreement: license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content; [...] By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.

ndriscoll 2y ago
"Own a copy" doesn't mean anything here. They have a non-exclusive sublicensable license to use Your Content. They have no ownership at all of Your Content, and have no standing to do anything if someone commercially exploits it (except for content posted by Reddit itself). The individual comments/posts are copyrighted by the individual posters. To the extent that Reddit does not give you a sublicense to exploit the content, the individual posters would be the ones who could make a claim for copyright infringement. If you don't have an account, then you haven't agreed to the ToS. Indeed, you can visit e.g. https://old.reddit.com/new/.json https://old.reddit.com/new/.json to fetch the latest posts without ever even seeing a link to any terms of service, much less agreeing to any. If someone distributes that scraped data via torrent (they do), then (again, except for posts by Reddit staff) Reddit has nothing to say. They have no claim to that data.
- gunapologist99 2y ago
  Agreed, except that those people who haven't agreed to the ToS also have no legitimate right to the work outside of a separate agreement with the publisher. Just putting it on Reddit doesn't make it fair game for everyone. Similarly, posting a news article to Facebook grants FB the same rights, more or less, but it doesn't grant Joe Random the right to re-publish the same article unless he makes an outside deal with the original author.