Twitter can edit, modify, or adapt materials without author permission/knowledge

Organization focused on moving and displaying other peoples bits has a ToS allowing then to do so. It might be too vague because it's less risky to be vague than to attempt being precise and opening yourself up to opportunistic lawsuits. News at eleven.

People are too quick to understand these new terms as solely necessary to provide service. The entire paragraph is:

> "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services."

It is easy to associate the concession of license (specially the "You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, ... to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication ... subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.") with the service provided ("This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same"), but I do not see where it say that Twitter can only do this for providing the service. AFAIK, Twitter still can, for example, sell photos to a news agency through this same terms.

Of course, IANAL.

Every time one of these armchair lawyer articles is posted it stirs up a bunch of fretting about nothing. These are the legal requirements of a TOS that lets Twitter (or Google, or Facebook, or...) handle things like uploading images, creating thumbnails (including changing aspect ratio) and distributing the result to users, without a photographer suing them for copyright infringement.

Don't like that it's overly broad? Your problem is with copyright lawyers, not with Twitter.