Ring used video captured on Halloween for PR
mashable.com
mashable.com
That seems like a clear answer...
> "The company is able to do this thanks to a broad terms of service agreement that grants it the perpetual right to use footage shared with it for 'any purpose' it chooses," BuzzFeed wrote.
I always find this odd. Lots of people tell me that they make these TOS to "cover their asses" with the assumption that everyone sues left and right over everything. So do these people realize that that's not exactly what's happening? Do people think of this usage of footage as abuse of the TOS? Because I sure do. I'm not sure how it is really different from copying someone's art and claiming it as your own and (successfully) selling it.
...in the US.
In other places the laws can be different, especially if the camera hasn't been registered.
I think this is the implication that should be considered in this situation and I think this makes Ring either very stupid or very greedy (or both).
I don't know why anyone would want any kind of internet recording device from Amazon in or around their home. Why are people willingly enslaving themselves to corporations? I don't see what the incentive is for people.
Many of us would love if it wasn’t a good long term strategy. But fb, google, tinder, uber and others point in the direction that the market doesn’t care.
Generally whenever journalist post sensational article, where they clearly didn't give other party enough time to respond, I see it more as an example of shitty journalism, because clearly journalist is more interested in flashy headline and breaking news, than the truth.
They own the rights to everything you type into a browser that has their plug-in installed. If you types a novel in google docs using a bowser they actually own the rights to that novel.
They capture everything that comes into the browser, everything.
After having a 2 hour call with Grammerly and their lawyers, it was pretty clear that they believe they own in perpetuity everything you type, bu they look at everything that is sent to the browser.
If you work for a healthcare company Or a financial services company Grammerly is seeing all of your data, they think they own it, and can sell it.
With my current job, I've come to appreciate that there are quite a few large companies that thoroughly read the ToS and take issue with them.
Ownership All intellectual property rights in and to the User Content are and shall remain your property, and Grammarly shall acquire no right of ownership with respect to your User Content.
The "royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content" part is pretty broad. It has the caveat "in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services", but that is also pretty broad, and I wouldn't be surprised if they interpreted it generously.
If you were building a competing service and typed code into the browser somewhere, apparently they would have a license to use that to improve their own service.
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Subject: legal question
Does this:
>"a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content" (quote from [link][https://www.grammarly.com/terms])
Mean:
"We can use or sell your text to anyone, in any form, without paying you any royalty." (my translation)
?
I notice despite all of the words about "fully-paid" and "royalty", it doesn't use any words like "publish", nor "sell". Could Grammarly sell a book of its users' writing?
IANAL, so I may have misread the clause. (The other quoted clauses were what I would have expected.
Thank you,
[my name]
---
5 minutes after sending (a Monday), I received this automated reply:
---
Subject: Your request # [xxxxxx] | legal question
##- Please type your reply above this line -## Thanks for contacting us here at Grammarly!
This is an automated reply to let you know we’ve received your request. We know you’re busy, so we will work quickly to get you an answer and let you get on with your day.
While we’re working on this request, you can pop over to support.grammarly.com to check our Knowledge Base, where you’ll find lots of helpful information about our products.
Talk soon,
Your friends at Grammarly
---
The next day a different agent replied:
Hello [my name],
Thanks for reaching out!
The Ownership section of the Terms of Service should address your concern. It states “All intellectual property rights in and to the User Content are and shall remain your property, and Grammarly shall acquire no right of ownership with respect to your User Content.”
Here’s what that means:
By using Grammarly, you are giving us a nonexclusive license to use your content in connection with providing our services. In other words, you’re giving us formal permission to provide writing suggestions and corrections to you and to use your writing to improve our algorithms. You remain the owner of your content.
For example, if you write a novel while using Grammarly, the copyright remains under your control. That means that only you have the right to sell, publish, or distribute your novel.
Importantly, please note that Grammarly does not sell or rent your personal data to third parties.
Best regards,
Alice
----
I thought that was an awesome and well-written reply, so I said:
Hi Alice,
Wow, that is a great (and convincing) answer! One last question: did you use grammarly to help you write this impactful answer?
Best regards,
[my name]
------
And received the reply
Sure! Grammarly helps us ensure our writing is polished, impactful, and mistake-free.
Kindly,
Alice
----------
So it's clear that according to their support agents, they don't own a book you write. Of course, the support agent could be wrong.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/
> Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). [...] This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
Google: https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).
Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/
> To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services. If you publish Your Content in areas of the Service where it is available broadly online without restrictions, Your Content may appear in demonstrations or materials that promote the Service. [Highlight by me]
Apple: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/term...
> Our Services may allow you to submit materials such as comments, pictures, videos, and podcasts (including associated metadata and artwork). [...] You hereby grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, nonexclusive license to use the materials you submit within the Services and related marketing, and Apple internal purposes. Apple may monitor and decide to remove or edit any submitted material.
Github seems to be the only one I looked at which actually lists something they are not allowed to do: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
> We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies as necessary to render the Website and provide the Service. This includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.
> This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content or otherwise distribute or use it outside of our provision of the Service.
In one I am uploading content to a platform, in the other I am utilizing grammarly to validate what I write, but I am not posting to any forum/service owned by Grammarly (atleast not deliberately)
a) at what point is content uploaded to Grammarly. Is it uploaded automatically as you input (if you have the Chrome extension), or is it uploaded only where a user activates the extension. Clearly if the latter, then no one is going to be using Grammarly to check their code so no issue. Even if the former, it's still debatable whether or not the terms of use would even grant rights. It's still limited to content 'in connection with the use of the services or software' - content uploaded passively without any user action (aside from the initial act of installing the extension) doesn't fall neatly into that bracket.
b) The likelihood of Grammarly taking a decision to incorporate third party code into their service or to improve their service on the basis of the license granted in the terms of use is extremely slim. The reputational hit if it were to come out, and the lack of legal certainty over the status of the third party code would both act as a strong disincentive to do this.
What if the extension is always running? Looking in every text field it finds? Because that would be convenient, but clearly we aren't "using the service" in all instances (as in ignoring what it suggests because it is easier than turning it off).
The closest thing I can see is the indemnity section which limits damages. If you're an editor and paste an author's work in, they can't get any damages from Grammarly, if you paste your own work in, your damages are limited to 12 months subscription - even if they bound your input into a novel and published it, or were hacked and somebody else published it. However, it would still be a criminal act of copyright infringement.
I think this para clearly tells the user that he or she retains the rights to content, and it goes on to say that Grammarly only needs these rights to provide the service and improve the algorithms. I don't think it says that Grammarly get to keep the content and do what they like with it.
> You retain all right, title, and interest in and to your User Content. By uploading or entering any User Content, you give Grammarly (and those it works with) a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content (and, if you are an Authorized User, your Enterprise Subscriber’s User Content) in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services.
See eg HN's tos:
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
"in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services."
This on the face of it wouldn't extend to selling your content. Obviously terms of use can change, but a material change like granting Grammarly the right to sell content would usually oblige Grammarly to notify users and at that point users could take a decision to stop using the service.
Also, realistically any proposal to sell data would make use of the service for great swathes of enterprise users a complete non-starter.
But there's another scenario that I think is interesting. Let's just assume that Google makes a similar claim about things in google docs (because I'm pretty sure they do).
So if you write a novel in Google docs and use Grammerly, who owns the novel? You? Google? Grammerly? What happens if all three of you try to publish said book?
I feel like the public stance would be "the writer owns the book", but I think they'd also give concessions for Google and Grammerly who did some work (provided software and error checking). It'll be interesting to see how we work these things out.
I've made the experience that unless they can make profit off you, you threaten to sue them, or take them to the union/board/bureau/cops, no company is ever going to "get back to you immediately".
Are there any alternatives that would meet those requirements?
I don’t understand the difference. It appears you are just trading AWS for Tyco / Johnson Controls cloud.
Turns out I don’t like staring at a camera every time I come and go. And it’s obviously intentional it’s a cloud only product for a reason, they absolutely could do local storage but the model is mining and storage.
Took me about 3 days to figure out this was a bad purchase.
Using Home Assistant[0], you can use the motion detection found in many IP cameras to trigger various events[1]. This includes recording video or sending you notifications[2] about it so you can watch it live. If you don't have motion detection in your camera, you can buy a motion detection module for about $10.
The cost of setup is the price of the camera and a machine (such as an R.Pi) to run Home Assistant on, or perhaps a Zigbee base station as well (about ~$30) depending on what you want to do.
I had a fairly decent-sized setup, including sensors on every door and window, temperature/pressure/humidity sensors in every room + outside, every single lightbulb (exc. bathrooms) was RGB and network connected, as well as light and motion sensors across different parts of my house. I had wireless buttons connected that would do various things depending on how they're interacted with and an IR-emitter that I eventually used to start programming my fan and to interact with my TV.
I think I spent about $200 in total on all of it.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/
You don't have to use YAML? :-)
The actual culprit is that we in the USA don’t have sufficient laws that force companies to clearly explain the kinds of rights people sign away by using various services.
Making terms and conditions long, boring, and often not automatically expanded or viewed is all a part of the scam.
It should be mandatory for things like this to be opt-in instead of opt-out.
It should be mandatory for the terms to be summarized in a clear fashion in about a sentence or two.
It should be mandatory for services like this to provide a convenient alternative if the service gives up a defined amount of rights.
So in this case, my proposal would be, if the sharing features require giving up copyright protections like this, Ring should be forced to provide an alternative social media sharing function that does not give up those rights. If the sharing function didn’t give up those rights, then Ring wouldn’t have to provide this alternative under this hypothetical law.
In any event, with all this said, it’s a commercial. It’s staged. Why go through the effort of finding all these clips, making sure they’re not only entertaining but recorded with decent video quality, if you can just spend an afternoon with nearly-free child actors making the commercial in ideal filming conditions. The only reason Ring is not being forthcoming about the video source is that they don’t want to admit it’s staged (not that they want to confirm or deny that they got permission to use some home footage).
Is it really easier for us to creep around spying on people like some stalker or peeping Tom? Maybe we should sort this out, before someone does it for us.
Based on the low quality of their selections, I would postulate about 20.
People are annoyed that footage from their family trick-or-treat session was used, without their permission or any payment to them, by Ring for adverts.
People are annoyed that millions of unregistered surveillance cameras are being installed with few protections or oversight. They're realising that creating a panopticon might also need to include some protection for how the data is used.
They should have read the terms of service. Really I'm tired of this argument. "X service should not exist because nobody reads the terms of service"? What about the people who read them? Why should they be deprived of using this service?
>People are annoyed that millions of unregistered surveillance cameras are being installed with few protections or oversight. They're realising that creating a panopticon might also need to include some protection for how the data is used.
People should be able to put whatever they want in their lawns.
Anyway I'm sceptical about this being actual footage from Ring; I'd say they recorded it with actors.
A child puts on a costume and visits someone's home to trick-or-treat them. That child's image is now used by ring in adverts.
When did that child read and accept a ToS?
Where in the Ring ToS / Privacy statement does it say that they'll use Ring video for adverts? Please could you link to the page and quote the text?
I think my protection from being surveilled should not rely on my neighbour's ability to read and interpret a ToS.
> People should be able to put whatever they want in their lawns.
I tend to agree, but lots of ring cameras are installed so that they also capture stuff that happens off the installer's property. They can capture the neighbour's lawn and driveways, or they can capture the public street.