Eventbrite has removed filming clause from agreement | Hacker News Reader

Eventbrite has removed filming clause from agreement

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89 pointsblatherard27 comments

@chrisv_au's response [1] also merits concern:

> Maybe @eventbrite should explain why they sent no official communications about changes to their t&c's - either to add this section, or to remove it.

[1] https://twitter.com/chrisv_au/status/988195013308772353?s=20

They did, as Chris himself then points out in the next tweet. It was however cased in that fluffy language that those communications always are.

> Terms of Service: We reorganized our Terms of Service to make them easier to read. Some changes include: new provisions regarding the recording of events, modifications to the arbitration provision, additional rules governing refunds, and incorporation of a Data Processing Addendum for Organizers.

I'm glad to see that update - while describing the addition of a provision as a "reorganization" seems... deceptive, to say the least, it's still better than no notification whatsoever.

For a non-jerky-you-around-y ticketing option, try https://lilregie.com -- it's a bootstrapped (self-funded) startup from the folks behind the Webstock conference. They built Lil Regie to meet their ticketing needs, offered it to the world, and have been adding features ever since. I have no equity, am just a happy customer.

No barcodes? At least, not that I can see in their marketing site or documentation.

Just checked with them. "Not quite yet! We're just testing a ticketing option and hope to release it soon. That will send out a PDF ticket with a unique barcode on it. However, someone will need to be able to read it. At a future date, we hope to have a Lil Regie app for that, but that will be a while away."

Wow, that's really cheap. I've been pretty happy with Brown Paper Tickets for a number of years. An important feature for me, that Lil Regie doesn't seem to have, is the ability to place ticket orders by phone. A lot of my customers aren't web savvy.

Pretix is FLOSS, has check-in apps (with barcode and offline support) and is cheaper (the hosted option).

https://pretix.eu/about/en/ https://github.com/pretix

Pretix is awesome, we used it for 4 conferences and workshops so far and had nothing but good impressions. Highly recommended!

Thanks, that's great to hear! :)

Gotta appreciate the promptness of the response here. I think a lot of EULA's are insanely overbroad, and my hope is companies start thinking twice before granting themselves various rights.

Ya, for all the faults of social media, and we know there are many, the ability to publicly shame companies doing sketchy things into changing is a plus. Who knows how this falls in the balance between good and evil?

How often does that work? It's like a lottery (quite possibly with the odds being just as bad). Some few, very very few times this works. Does that really change anything significantly in the grand scheme of things? Without having any numbers either I suspect overall impact is negligible. It's just enough for feel-good headlines. If it had an impact things should actually improve on a larger scale, I don't see any of that. From problems with government and/or police to corporate behavior, I don't see the positive trend (neither a negative one, it's just that things keep chugging along on a random walk as they always have, and whether you are optimistic or pessimistic depends on what selective information makes it into your brain).

I feel like there's a case for a Change.org that is more just "getting a bunch of people to shame companies on social media to change X"

IMO the reason support on Twitter works surprisingly well is because execs are very tuned in to social media sentiment/PR crisis aversion, so there's a lot of eyes on things people post publicly.

I have no doubt that the rate at which bad things come out has increased. My question is about the net total - it seems to me that overall everything has pretty much stayed the same.

Questions to myself: Am I right? Due to higher order effects, or due to unrelated orthogonal influences, or both? Examples for concrete questions: Did work conditions improve? Did product longevity improve? Did customer service improve? Do people live better, longer, happier? Is politics more honest? Do we trust politicians, companies (or insert any profession or entity you like) more? Is there more fairness? Freedom (example: "free range kids")? When you complain (and you are right about it), what are the chances that anything changes - and actually for the better, not just a workaround/quick fix without actual long-term net total improvement? Quite a bit room for subjectivity of course.

The same things happens with mobile apps requesting more permissions than they should/need.

I'm even less optimistic about seeing a positive change there when it's embedded in many pages of a EULA.

At least the operating systems are getting better at explaining permissions, but it's only as good as the user reading them and understanding what they're giving away.

For background, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16896396

if the event is in public, and they do the recording, is this clause even necessary? they already have the rights to their recording of you in public (not talking about the bat shit insane part about you being responsible for copyright on the content they are recording, like background music)

But most ticketed events are on private property. It’s not so much as public but that you have been invited in.

Also different regions have different rules about filming in public for commercial content as an example about where permission of everyone in the background might be needed to be granted see France https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/press-room/terms-and-condi...

I'm on staff at an anime convention. We use Eventbrite.

Our event is on private property, but more importantly - one of our traditional features is a couple of rooms in which attendees can simply watch anime with other people. Eventbrite's clause would be in direct violation of our agreements with licensors.

We can't even allow a second of footage of the content. Once I had to ask a guy who was wearing Google Glass to take it off, even though I knew he wasn't going to record anything, because it was a camera directly pointing at the screen. (He was very cool about it, and even let me try it out!)

To be honest this seems like lawyers being lawyers and EventBrite rectifying the situation promptly when they knew, and clarifying it had never happened IRL.

OP still not happy unless they go out of the way to shame themselves rather than generically referring to the issue?

The idea being that it was too buried for Eventbrite themselves to be aware of it?

There is no way high level managers and/or the CEO of Eventbrite did not know about this.

lawyers don't write in a bunch of permission clauses.

they turn what their clients asks for into legalese.

This might be the case, but I think that maybe the original request ( Hey guys, what if we could film such an event and use it for our promotion ), translated into legalese, had to be that broad otherwise it made no sense ( ie. that Eventbrite would have had to run after everyone to ask for permission to film, or that after filming, the participants would have to veto it ).

This is what I mean, hey lawyers we want to film events for promo stuff, and lawyers go through all the risks and make the contract super aggressive.

Senior level people at Eventbrite would have had to have known about this clause. The fact that they allowed it in the first place communicated quite a bit about their priorities.

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