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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

By accepting this Agreement or using a Nintendo 3DS System or the Nintendo 3DS Service, you also grant to Nintendo a worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display your User Content in whole or in part and to incorporate your User Content in other works, in any form, media or technology now known or later developed, including for promotional or marketing purposes. (Chapter 1, Nintendo 3DS End User License Agreement)

Just playing devil's advocate, isn't this a fairly standard clause so that the company involved can release, e.g., statistics on the most popular games, or show what games are most popular with which age groups and genders?

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Usage isn't user content. There's no reason they couldn't track anonymized usage data. But they've meaningfully conflated usage data with other Personally Identifiable Information. Which means, no, it's not just boilerplate to cover the collection of broad demographic and usage data.

We also may share such information and any User Content you create with third parties. We may share your PII, Non-PII, and Aggregate Information with third parties to complete your transactions and provide you with advertising and other promotional materials on your Nintendo 3DS System.

In government & medical work, they hammer into you that PII must be protected. Nintendo specifically saying they can share it is a big deal. Agreed, PII != usage data.

I'm skeptical as well. While the terms are broad there may be a reason. Statistics and game usage information for developers come to mind. I'm sure there are other rather mundane uses of this data.

The content and scope of the ToS seems rather scary and far reaching, but one has to wonder if Nintendo is publishing thie ToS because it intends to use the devices as surveillance devices or are simply protecting their collective *sses from a litigious society.

Couldn't they better protect their collective * sses from a litigious society by producing a TOS that is more reasonable?

I've also seen similar language described on other websites' TOS; didn't Facebook have a debacle about this too at one point? It was explained then that it was necessary basically because distributing uploaded/shared photos to CDNs and the like might involve additional production and distribution the user didn't explicitly authorize. They might need to copy your photos to give to the CDN vendor and the license needs to be sublicensable so the CDN vendor can legally copy shared photos across their network.

On the other hand, though, the marketing purpose part just sounds downright shady.

I don't think Facebook's questionable language contains the "fully sublicensable" bit, which clearly implies they plan to sell anything created using a DS.

(And even just the "worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive" bit is draconian. Facebook was under fire for adding "irrevocable."

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