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Comment by watertom | Hacker News Reader

Go read the terms for Grammerly.

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.

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For those interested, appears to be the last paragraph under "User Content" [1]

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.

[1] https://www.grammarly.com/terms#user-content

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.

Link - https://www.grammarly.com/terms#ownership

That is in regards to ownership; it is true that you would still own the content, but they get an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty free, sublicensable, and transferrable license to use it.

But use it to improve the underlying algorithm/service. I don't think they have a license to publish or sell any User Content.

"You appear to be writing an essay on the causes of the Civil War. Would you like to read an essay on the causes of the Civil War with better grammar from another user?"

I asked them about this in March of this year. I wrote them this:

---

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.

While I agree that they are very wide, and this is anti-user, those terms seem pretty standard in the industry. No need to single out grammarly.

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.

I think there is a difference between how we interact with some of these services and Grammarly. Uploading a picture on Facebook is different from having Grammarly check if what you are posting to Facebook is correct.

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)

I think there's a few points:

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.

> or is it uploaded only where a user activates the extension.

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).

For sure - that was my thinking on the alternative scenario. If that happens then that certainly changes the picture somewhat although my other points remain true around what Grammarly would decide to do with that content I would say!

The rights Grammarly (https://www.grammarly.com/terms) take to use your data is limited as follows:

"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.

Which section of the TOS is that in? I don't see anything about that, but it's a very long TOS so I just searched some keywords. You are also contradicting their own FAQ.

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.

Parent poster seems to be talking about this, which is a standard feature of any ToS that allows services to operate at all.

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.

I’d be interested to hear more about why this 2 hour call happened, if you’re willing to share.

Not the OP, but I'm assuming it was due diligence for a company interested in using the product and that read the ToS, then called to clarify.

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.

Is this true? I opened up Grammarly TOS and found this:

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.

Link - https://www.grammarly.com/terms#ownership

Not saying this is what they mean, but isn't there a difference between ownership and license to use something?

There’s also the issue of multi-user systems. The person who installs the extension is only competent to bind themselves to terms, and Grammerly doesn’t have any explicit relationship with other people that may use the same browser, especially if they never activate any of the extension’s features.

This should be a post on its own!

This is really interesting, because that specific example seems to violate HIPAA laws. Definitely GDPR.

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.

This needs more attention... thanks for bringing it up.

So... why did I get downvoted for thanking someone for their post??

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