> The above legal language applies ONLY to replies to this tweet using #MayThe4th and mentioning @DisneyPlus . These replies may appear in something special on May the 4th!
https://twitter.com/disneyplus/status/1254849654585323525
... as if that's really any better.
From their terms of use: "Disney DTC LLC and/or its affiliates and subsidiaries (collectively, “Disney” “we” or “us”) are pleased to provide to you certain websites, software, applications, content, products, and services (“Disney Products” and “Products”), which may be branded Disney, ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, FX, Fox Searchlight, 20th Century Fox, National Geographic, or another brand owned or licensed by Disney."
What Disney is arguing is that their Twitter account is magically a "Disney Service", and that by tweeting at them, and using a specific hashtag, you are magically using their service, which would then bind you to their terms of service.
Fuck right off. That's not how this works.
I understand what Disney wants, it wants to use other people's tweets in their own promotion materials. That is fine, provided they ask permission from the authors of said tweets. But since they're lazy fucks, they're trying to pre-emptively argue that if you use that hashtag, they already asked, and you already said ok, so they don't have to go through the hard, hard, work of actually asking people and documenting their consent.
The only way to challenge this is for you to tweet something to Disney that they then use in their marketing material. That allows you to send them a cease and desist, because you didn't give them permission to use your tweet in that way. At that point Disney is just going to say "ok", shitlist you, and stop using your tweet, because that's cheaper than any alternative.
This is just overreaching bullshit CYA legalese that's never going to get challenged in court.
How do you figure?
"You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content)."
(Twitter certainly isn't unique here, this is the gold standard for user-submitted content. Users always own their content, but grant the service an unlimited royalty-free transferable license to copy, process, display and "perform" the content.)
This is what unfettered and auto-extending copyright enables.
So Disney is claiming that if I reply to their tweet and use the hashtag, and if my reply contains content that is ok according to Twitter's terms of use, but not ok according to Disney's terms of use, I am magically violating Disney's terms of use. Despite me not using an actual Disney service, despite them having zero control over my tweets, and despite me not accepting their terms of use in the first place.
Hell no.
I'm not saying you all should reply to that tweet with your best Chewbacca furry porn. But you totally should.
>Will Google use my social media posts to promote Code Jam?
>If you share or post content on any Coding Competitions social media page(s) or tag a post with a Contest hashtag (e.g. #CodeJam) on your social media account, then Google may feature your Social Media Content in marketing and promotional materials for any Coding Competitions Contest. Learn more in the Coding Competitions Terms.
Guess it is more binding when they write that on their webpage than on their social media
"Walt Disney World was awesome! Thanks to all the hard workers who made the day special.
By replying to this Tweet, Disney Corp. hereby agrees to abide by the copyright laws in place as of the release dates of its motion pictures, instead of the longer dates obtained through perversion of the legal system by Disney and its lobbyists."
In all seriousness, I'm sure Disney never thinks for a moment that the law would ever be applied fairly to them or that this tweet could come back to bite them.
It's totally legitimate to favor shorter copyright, but essentially any duration is an arbitrary one. It strikes me as odd that you would be interested in applying the law fairly while also referring to the law as a perversion.
tl;dr: 7-2 as long as there is some type of time limitation, Congress is free to extend copyright terms.
Presumably SCOTUS would say that an effectively-infinite timeline is not "limited" within the Constitutional definition of the word. Eldred v. Ashcroft basically tried to argue that continual decades-long extensions amounted to this, but the Court was not convinced.
This is a good point worth bringing up, since the GP seems to imply it isn't with reference to the wording of the constitution's Copyright Clause.
However, it doesn't answer the moral question of whether congress should have passed that law, or whether congress should pass laws to change copyright term lengths to be shorter. That's not the role of the court.
The public did not benefit in any way from its extension. Quite the opposite: every time the duration of copyright terms is extended, the public is robbed of its rights so that corporations which have already made billions off of their copyrighted works can make even more money. When was the last time some copyrighted work entered the public domain? Probably the early 20th century. When people think public domain, what comes to mind is renaissance art and classical music. The truth is everything created in the 80s and before should already be in the public domain and that's very generous, more than enough time for companies to get rich off of their creations.
The original social contract behind copyright was "we'll pretend your intellectual work is scarce for some time so you can profit and then it will enter the public domain". Works aren't entering the public domain because every time Mickey Mouse is about to become public property Disney spends millions lobbying the government in order to extend the copyright duration. Copyright is effectively infinite despite what the law says. So why should the public recognize copyright as legitimate to begin with?
>When was the last time some copyrighted work entered the public domain?
January 1st, 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_public_domain
I don't know.. I mean yeah, but something strikes me as really wrong about that.
"Walt Disney World was awesome! Thanks to all the hard workers who made that day special.
By replying or retweeting this Tweet, Walt Disney Corp. hereby agrees in perpetuity to sell to the owner of this twitter account for $1, per motion picture, an unlimited, license for any purpose."
> Walt Disney World was awesome! Thanks to all the hard workers who made that day special.
> By retweeting or mentioning this tweet, Disney agrees to grant every natural person that likes this tweet unlimited redistribution rights and has to pay each liking twitter account 1000 EUR per month per unique click.
Although scientifically speaking, the rounding off error of your original formulation is bigger :)
Copyright was not always as it is today.
Transforming this "copy-right" from a right given by the monarch to a right given by the authors was a key event on the way of Liberalism replacing Monarchism and changing all common law to be based on human rights. One should notice that this "exclusive right to copy" restricts the right to use such "intellectual property", which is why Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive must be opposed unless, at least, fair use is granted.
Early modern copyright was even more restrictive: its intent was to restructure what became an uncontrollable market: having authors license their works exclusively to some large publishers starved the small presses and ensured a controllable elite that would not dare to print seditious materials. Owning an unregistered printing press was illegal under the threat of violence. It is naive to belief the primary intent was to prevent harm to the income of the authors. Until today the right to copy is mostly a right of the publishers. Authors sign it away and consumers do not get it.
I don't think Disney is setting any precedent or anything else weird by saying "send us messages you want us to publish, by the way here are the specific terms we want to use" on Twitter, they've been doing that for a long time before twitter even existed. Think about America's Funniest Home Videos, they did exactly this for decades but over TV.
Your tweet fails to give Disney any "consideration" so it's not going to be a valid contract and not because it's in a tweet. Offer them clearer terms and a dollar and then maybe you'd have a point. Right now they offer you a chance to see your tweet in some marketing materials, better than nothing right?
Lastly, this is incredibly specifically scoped. Does anyone tweeting "Love the new movie #MayTheFourth @Disney" really expect Disney not to want to use it? They are going to have someone review the tweets before they use them. How could this possibly come back to bite Disney?
The problem is that they claim that anybody who tweets at them and uses their hashtag is entering into a contract agreement with the Walt Disney Corporation, which can be found at https://disneytermsofuse.com/ . This is ridiculous because nobody needs Disney's permission to use Twitter. If somebody were to use Twitter to express to Disney a desire to enter into a contract that might be valid, but Disney can't unilaterally declare that anybody who sends a communication to them over a given medium is unconditionally agreeing to be bound by their terms of use.
They made the requirements pretty clear and stringent enough that I very much doubt anyone is at risk of accidentally entering into that contract, but if that does happen, then the contract would be null. I just don't see that happening though.
The problem is Disney co-opting two regular parts of Twitter's service, and then claiming that represents a Disney service. It isn't, and can clearly be used for purposes beyond establishing a contract.
You can set up a phone line or P.O box with the same terms of service agreement. Twitter is not sacred. You can call that "co-opting" those services I suppose, but I don't see why that's a bad thing. Services exist to be used.
Disney is going to use some common sense when reviewing these tweets and filter out the trolls and people disputing the terms. They are not out here trying to trap helpless children into a contract, just make some marketing materials. Again, this is not the first time this has been done and is not controversial. Maybe I underestimated the number of troll tweets, but I'm sure Disney will figure it out just fine.
Yes they are. Did you not read their tweet? They literally called it a contract and said that they believe anybody who replies to them with that hashtag is agreeing to its terms. Their choice not to exercise the rights they are granted by that contract doesn't mean that there isn't a contract.
The only thing that does mean there isn't a contract is that their logic is bullshit and they can't unilaterally decide that somebody else has entered into a contract with them.
“@Disney #MayThe4th This tweet enters into Disney’s offered contract, except that Disney agrees to pay $100,000 for the license to optionally publish this Tweet and to include it in Tweet analysis corpuses. If Disney doesn’t explicitly object within 48 hours or collects this tweet as part of a database, they accept this modification.”
IANAL, genuinely curious.
In this case Disney offered a contract that you enter into via tweeting a reply. If you send back modified terms then Disney has the chance to review the new contract and reject or accept it. If a human saw your tweet and still included it in whatever marketing materials they are creating then you might have a good case.
Just as Disney would need to argue that you knew you were being bound by their ToS when you tweeted them, you need to show they accepted your terms. The part of your example about a time limit wouldn't fly for that reason. Both sides also have to think the contract is reasonable (not a joke). If you put a bajillion dollars as the price, there's no contract. I'm not sure if $100k for a tweet is believable.
It isn't.
Twitter's ToS gives Twitter a license. But not third parties on Twitter.
Disney could buy a license from Twitter who would be able to use the rights they're granted by their ToS, but they would need another contractual agreement to do so.
When he sued the bank to enforce his contract for a no-fee account with an unlimited line of credit at 0% interest he won. Fortunately for the bank he was prudent in his spending despite his access to unlimited funds so he hadn’t racked up much of a bill.
Story here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/read-the-sma...
Couldn't replying to their tweet be considered sending it to Disney?
> Couldn't replying to their tweet be considered sending it to Disney?
Is replying to a column in an opinion piece sending it to the author or the newspaper?
> Couldn't replying to their tweet be considered sending it to Disney?
Disney apparently does "consider" that to be sending it to Disney. Since Twitter doesn't belong to Disney, I don't see how that could have any legal relevance. Twitter has its own terms of service.
(I am not a lawyer.)
Also I think there's a time delay on seeing the reply link on replies to your own comments.
That’s not what Disney is doing. What Disney is doing would be like if I said “Anyone who Tweets at me owes me $5.” That’s obviously not a binding contract.
Shouldn't they be negotiating with Twitter for that though?
Sending a tweet to Disney with a generic hashtag can't be considered consent in any way, shape or form. What guarantee does DisneyPlus have that everyone sending them a tweet with hashtag #MayThe4th is intending that to count as consent?
The new clarification is absolutely better to not claim ownership over the entire hashtag, but it is questionable to claim in one tweet that any replies made to a different tweet are an agreement to a private TOS.
Of course the way they said that could have been worked on.
However, if Disney plans to copy and paste the tweets into another graphic, they felt they wouldn't have the appropriate license to reuse text copywritten by others, without this odd TOS.
The one thing about this that plays into Disney's favor, is the attention probably reduces someones honest ability to say "I never saw the agreement tweet."
But the over-lawyer-ification and impracticality of opting out of corporate terms of service is an widespread problem. This is an interesting expansion of that problem, so it deserves highlighting.
Other than that it just seems like a way to ask people to allow them to use replies in a video or something.
Edit: But wait, this is actually STILL ambiguous! On twitter, a 'mention' happens automatically when you reply to a tweet, because it includes the name of the account replied to, so it's not clear whether you actually have to tag @disneyplus or not.