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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

I don't know who started this meme that you don't own content that you put on Medium, but it's totally wrong:

https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...

You own the rights to the content you post on Medium. We don’t claim ownership over any of it. However, by posting or transferring content to Medium, you give us permission to use your content solely to do the things we need to do to provide Medium Services, including, without limitation, storing, displaying, reproducing, and distributing your content. This may include promoting your content with partner companies or services for broader broadcast, distribution, or publication.

This is identical to the ToS for any hosted blogging service such as Blogger or Wordpress - you have to give them a license to your words for the site to do their job.

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True, and practically speaking it's pretty standard from what I've seen in writing fields. Very similar to music such as on Soundcloud.

I think the only 'hangup' that might be in the conditions would be "without limitation" insofar as when does "the things we need to do to provide Medium Services" conflict with the content producer being compensated. As in, if "partner companies" and Medium are engaged in some compensation / revenue undertaking, at what point does an author on the platform have some "say" in the way the content gets used...e.g. a person posts a beautiful poem, Medium can print that poem in an ad in the New York Times to self-promote, and the author seemingly gets nothing, which doesn't seem appropriate.

Not saying that's the intent or anything, but I think healthy suspicion is helpful to all parties for clarity.

(riffing on your comments, not disagreeing)

I'm looking at that and thinking the way they've phrased it means that 'without limitation' is required to avoid exposing themselves to lawsuits over details, and 'solely' is meant as their promise to the users.

So ... healthy suspicion good, but I feel like they've tried to set it up so that they can only be sued for violating the letter of the agreement, but can (and expect to) be publically excoriated for violating the spirit.

Whether they'll continue to live up to these ideals over time is (aaand we're back to healthy suspicion :) inevitably an open question, but I think the intent is to make it clear that those ideals do exist now in a way that allows us to hold them to it later.

Excellent point, and thanks for elaborating on the "spirit" component as it relates to the phrasing. I'm on board with you in that it's a functional way of doing business, legally speaking, but could benefit from public oversight (e.g. reputation).

I think the "don't own your content" part is neatly explained in this post: http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html

Essentially, authors give up a lot of control to put their work on Medium. It's not that they no longer own their words but that they've given up specific notions of value to publish on Medium. And Medium has specific ideas about the value of the writing published on it reflected in its advertising, etc.

This is unrelated to the conversation at hand... but for a site that calls itself "Practical Typography", something about the font and typesetting there makes me almost squint when I try to read that page.

I know what you mean! I feel like I'm squinting at a typewritten page of text, or something fresh from the printer with maybe a little too much ink on it. It's beautiful, but such a departure from what I normally read it's always a little startling. Maybe my monitor isn't high enough DPI or something.

"do their job"

Why is

> This may include promoting your content with partner companies or services for broader broadcast, distribution, or publication.

"doing their job"? What if I do not want them to do that with my content? Have I ceded my control? Can I tell them not to do so?

You know when you see one of those Twitter embeds where a tweet or a conversation is pulled into a different page? That's "broader distribution" right there, and if Medium made that kind of feature I'd certainly count that as "doing their job".

And I'd count it as "using my content in a way I did not authorize", but HN seems okay with that.

Then don't license your works to a third party website so they can be displayed on said site. Simple.

Don't be asinine.

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