Never ever write software for Oculus | Hacker News Reader

Never ever write software for Oculus

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29 pointsrmi_20 comments

It's easy to get mad about stuff you don't understand, read or research correctly.

It even states that "In the event you are a developer who submits User Content to Oculus, you acknowledge and agree that our agreements with you as a developer may supersede this section of the Terms."

In any case, this section of the ToS is not even about Software, but about User Content. There's a "Developer Distribution Agreement" for that: https://share.oculus.com/developer-distribution-agreement

Quote: "You grant to Oculus a nonexclusive, worldwide, and royalty-free license to: copy, perform, display, and use the Products for administrative and demonstration purposes in connection with the operation and marketing of the Store and to use the Products to make improvements to the Store, Rift, and any other Oculus products and services."

Valves Steam Distribution Agreement looks similar (if http://stuff.danbo.vg/sda.html is to be believed): "Company hereby grants to Valve a non-exclusive license to reproduce, publicly display and perform, transmit, sell, license and otherwise distribute the Applications in object code form via Steam and through any type of payment method to Steam Account Owners in the Territory."

Not trying to defend any companies here. Those terms might as well be shitty. I don't know, I'm not a jurist or anything. But at least get the facts right.

Nothing seems especially horrible here, they're basically saying that if you submit things to their distribution network (whatever it is, I honestly have no idea) that they can then distribute it worldwide. A little strange that they don't allow you to terminate it at some point but that's probably to ensure growth of whatever this Store thing is going to be.

But I mean, no one had a gun to your head about writing Oculus software anyway, so...

Among other rights it includes the right to "adapt" (i.e. modify), so it isn't just about distribution rights.

If you upload an image, and they want to re-encode it, or create a thumbnail for it, they need that right assigned to them it they're infringing copyright.

In the case of software content, that would include automatically recompiling the content that you upload to a new target format in the future, so if Oculus develop a new way of deploying content in 5 years time they won't have to bin everything people have uploaded. It's not really any different to Youtube asking for a license to transcode video content in to new formats.

They could ask only for the right to do that sort of thing, but a more broad language covers things no one will have thought of. It's not (necessarily) evil.

Creating a thumbnail, re-encoding, rounding corners, borders, auto enhance etc. I can think of a million ways websites modify user's photos. Likewise for uploaded text they filter for black words, auto trim, strip XSS/SQL attacks etc.

All of this is "adapting".

Consider this example: If you upload some screenshots of your app to an app store for Oculus/Apple/Google/whoever to display with your app, what exactly do you think a thumbnail is? Or transcoding from JPEG to PNG? Legally, it's a derivative work, i.e. an adaptation. There is nothing sinister about it. Lawyers gonna lawyer.

This is really one of the worst submissions I've seen in the many years I've been on here. It offers no cogent, insightful argument why as a developer I should be afraid nor anything particularly useful other than give up the opportunity to develop for a lucrative, ground breaking platform. Brilliant.

And as a developer surely this person would understand why this clause is necessary. Because when a user uploads a photo to a service they will use it, copy it, adapt it (e.g. re-encode, make thumbnail), display it and distribute it (e.g. to CDNs). All of which needs a sublicense in order to do.

Huh? This paragraph

> By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual (i.e. lasting forever), non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable (i.e. we can grant this right to others) right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services

is pretty much standard in terms of service for virtually any type of online service or, well, anything which involves user-created content. They're not asking for control over your work, they just want to be sure you can't sue them for copyright violation simply by virtue of you using their service and them distributing your content for you.

It's legal boilerplate and should not be worrying. Read the ToS of your favourite social media service, it probably has the same paragraph near-verbatim.

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If you don't believe me, look at the individual provisions, they're quite reasonable:

“worldwide” – Oculus want to be sure that they're able to distribute your content in not just your home country, but all regions they're distributing it in.

“irrevocable” – Oculus do not want you to be able to revoke their ability to legally distribute your content while they're still doing so. This doesn't mean they won't give you the option to stop doing so.

“perpetual” – Likewise, it would be problematic for Oculus if in a year's time they could no longer legally distribute your content. Again, if you wish to stop distributing it, you can ask them to.

“non-exclusive” – You're not giving up your rights to let other people distribute the same content.

“transferable” – Oculus themselves might be distributing the content, but what if they later merge with another company? In which case, they need to be able to transfer the license.

“royalty-free” – Oculus do not want to have to pay you for every single time they make a copy of your content. This doesn't mean they won't pay you if people, say, buy your game.

“fully sublicensable” – Oculus, in the course of distributing your content, might use other services (for example, Amazon AWS). In the course of doing so, they need to be able to extend this license to them.

“use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services” – Covers every possible use they can think of, because laws may consider each of these to be different.

The reason they ask for this license is because otherwise there's only an implicit one, and being outright about it saves them potential legal headaches. Each of these provisions is not necessarily implied in an implicit license grant. It's an unlimited do-anything license because that covers every possible use-case.

Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4dafji/never_e...

Most noteable:

> If the Terms Of Service didn't make you feel uneasy, try this one: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/legal/privacy-policy/

And discussion here about an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11420853

There's also the huge discussion about the Oculus "malware" that pings and listens to Facebook servers every X seconds and has full admin rights on the users machine: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4da3r5/oculus_home_...

Better stop using Facebook/Twitter/et al then

Some of us don't use those things to begin with.

That's fine, but the article makes it seem that this is some kind of out-of-the-ordinary agreement. It's fine if you're opposed to such agreements as a matter of principle. It's just strange to single out Oculus for this. It's as though the original poster has never actually read a ToS document before.

And some of us wouldn't get too worried even if Twitter did decide to use one of our 120 character bon mots for advertising purposes, or put it in a "best of Twitter" movie, or whatever.

That's an entirely different thing from giving up the rights to code that you may have worked on for months.

Doesn't HN need a similar license to show your post to other people on HN?

All websites where user's upload content would need one of these clauses.

You can't just legally manipulate and distribute a user's photo without the authority to do so.

I went to scroll down ... and nothing. What? Where's the content?

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