Project idea: host version controlled TOS copies from companies to see what changes each time.
Docacracy did it a decade ago, but closed shop.
The problem isn’t the tech — it’s coming up with a business model that pays for the system and upkeep. As much as people give lip service about privacy, they sure don’t throw money at lobbying efforts that protect their rights in those areas.
The similarity between standard contracts does make it harder to demonstrate a copyright violation based on the text alone though.
That sounds absurd. What country is this?
No form of intellectual property applies to “in the history of the world” — all IPs expire their monopoly protections after a period of time.
And yes, contracts must be distinctly different from copyrighted contracts. [1] Just because computers and the internet allow copy-paste of content with no effort does not mean it is necessarily legal.
[1] https://www.upcounsel.com/are-contracts-copyrighted#using-so...
Heck, this is very easy to google:
https://www.quora.com/If-you-ask-a-lawyer-to-draft-a-contrac...
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24521/are-the-indivi...
https://www.upcounsel.com/are-contracts-copyrighted
Contracts are text and text is subject to copyright. You seem to be confused about the difference between copyright, patents and trademarks though. That copyright applies to contracts does not mean it's possible for two different lawyers to end up writing almost identical contracts. It instead means it's very difficult to demonstrate copyright infringement based on the text alone. But if you simply copy a contract verbatim that you demonstrably had access to and can't demonstrate how you arrived at the exact same wording (e.g. if you're a layperson and have never written a contract before), it's probably an easy case for the copyright holder to win.
This will apparently blow your mind but in some jurisdictions outside the US such as the EU, mere collections of facts ("databases") are also protected by copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right
Note that this does not mean you can't collect the same facts, it just means you can't harvest them from an existing collection and reproduce them the same way. So you couldn't just publish your own knock-off white pages phone book but you could publish a phone book as long as it is not sourced from an existing one. Please remember: this does not apply in US copyright law.
You can replace "garage" with whatever you want. Basically, if I'm a contractor I can sue every other contractor for uncreative derivative works. If I'm installing garages, I can sue my competitors. If I'm selling software, I can sue my competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
Even if it doesn't succeed 100% of the time, there is a non-zero chance people will settle. There's a non-zero chance that I can prevent other people from creating businesses in my market by simply writing every potential variation of some common contract elements.
That's why this is absurd that contracts can be copyrighted. You can argue that you'd have to prove intent, but people do that every day with news stories and win (I have a reporter friend that has been sued multiple times for 'copying stories' that they themselves wrote -- they win most of the time. In one case, I was sitting right beside him on the train while he wrote the story from his interview notes. The 'plaintive' tends to create a verbatim story on the web and change the publish date to some date in the past, then 'proves' they wrote it first. They don't win, but they do cause stories to be 'redacted' until it can be proven one way or the other. By then though, the news is old news.)
If I understand your example correctly, you would take an existing SaaS's ToS (i.e. copy their copyrighted work), publish it as your own (i.e. lie) and then file a DMCA takedown request (i.e. commit perjury) to force them to remove their ToS? Yes, you could do that. But since you likely can't demonstrate that you're the original copyright holder (e.g. trivially their SaaS pre-dates your service and they probably have internal documents like e-mails surrounding the drafting of the ToS whereas you don't unless you forge those as well) and sending a DMCA takedown request for works you don't actually own is literally a felony crime, I don't think that's a winning strategy.
To be clear: yes, there are laws against abusing DMCA takedown requests, precisely because otherwise anyone could just send them out for fun. Specifically DMCA takedown requests include a statement under penalty of perjury from the copyright holder that they hold the copyright. So this isn't a special DMCA law but just a boring old felony crime involved in fraudulently filing illegitimate legal claims.
If you're wondering why you've never heard of this it's probably because you're thinking of sites like YouTube which don't actually receive DMCA takedown requests normally but instead provide an arbitration system to allow content owners to avoid messy legal back-and-forths over the back of Google and instead be trusted based on who they are (i.e. smaller creators will be stuck in appeals limbo trying to talk to a human whereas large corporations will usually be trusted by default). This does not however apply to e.g. GitHub, which is why there is a public collection of DMCA takedown requests hosted by them: https://github.com/github/dmca
To speed up this conversation: if you can think of another example where your conclusion is "but this is dumb" then it's likely because your example is, not the legal situation you're looking at. Also "but this is dumb" is not a counter-argument to "this is what the law is like". The law does not care if you think it is dumb and saying it is dumb is not a good defense if you end up in court.
So technically scraping and republishing old ToS'es would be a copyright violation. You might have a case for fair use but then it becomes difficult to monetize the service.
Or you can use a friendlier service like the one provided by Codeberg.
https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
The problem is having people available to do the work that is needed to keep the system useful and up-to-date, which includes writing code that will parse the ToS, maintaining it, and upgrading programming languages, packages ... and most probably lawyers.
So where those diffs are hosted is a tiny cost of what is needed to make it work.
All these require effort. And effort can be paid with one of two things: time and money. And for someone to have time to work full-time on this, they need to have ... money to sustain themselves.
Thus this kind of project needs money => that either can be a grant, donation from a big entity, or business model. Donations from users are not working for long-term sustainability in most cases of good projects for society. Or at least I don't know a successful project like this.
People are too eager to expect some other person to invest their own time and effort in an open source project without considering the consequences of such an expectation.
People generally prefer convenience over privacy
Anyone with some knowledge of history can see what horrible things might happen if we build a comprehensive surveillance machine, but nothing terrible has happened yet. It’s hard to convince people to give up convenience to prevent a danger that hasn’t yet come and cannot be clearly seen.
With climate change it will take years of records for extreme weather being blown away. For this it might take a developed nation falling into hard core fascism and the digital dragnet being turned directly against its citizenry.
China is perhaps a case with its social credit system and camps, but it might not be extreme enough and may be too far away. It may have to happen here, or much worse. Americans in particular think “it can’t happen here” even though it almost has several times.
=> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37064152 TOS Notify
I wonder if they are serving different ToS in the EU (haven't received anything from Microsoft yet).
For a little while, (and I should resume this behavior) I would capture TOS and save them away to read at leisure.
Because what happens, especially with fiddly mobile apps, is that you're granted a single glimpse at the bona fide link to TOS/EULA, and never again will you find how you got there. (Sometimes the link fails right off the bat, giving you zero opportunity to read through the terms!)
So I would take advantage of that and save it, by any means necessary: screen scrape, copy-paste, print-as-PDF, take photo of screen with second device, whatever it took, because they could make it difficult!
But then I would usually end up with a copy of the contract that I could later call up and check on. So, your suggestion that analytics can determine my dwell time on the document when it's presented to me, that's not going to be indicative of how much time I really spent reading it after copying and saving it.
I've found that this is a good practice, and not for the reason you're thinking of. I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at reading legal documents like this (including my lease, employment contract, benefits and insurance docs, you name it) because even if I think I understand, I didn't get it, and it's pointless anyway because negotiating the wording is not on the table.
But it's a good practice to save these, because of this: there are often instructions included about how to resolve disputes and claims against the company. These instructions usually follow a strict procedure and they have rules about what you can do. They also have contact info, and again, you will never ever find this contact info anywhere else ever again if you don't save the EULA at first opportunity. They will tell you what kind of arbitration or court proceedings are acceptable, they will tell you the complaints procedure from start to end, time frames, and what to expect at each point. This info is gold, and it's not going to be available when you come to have a dispute, and you're not even going to be aware of the procedure at that point, and so you will automatically be disqualified and lose any dispute because you didn't follow procedure. Have fun!
I run it to see changes to my competitors websites. Well that’s the idea - I don’t actually monitor it LOL. I just have it running in Docker.
Disclaimer, I work on Monitoro.
Anyone can hit my username at gmail or telegram