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Comment by naitgacem | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of the highlighted clause

    you hereby grant Spotify a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, fully paid, irrevocable, worldwide license to reproduce, make available, perform and display, translate, modify, create derivative works from (such as transcripts of User Content), distribute, and otherwise use any such User Content through any medium

is actually necessary for the service to function in the first place. But something caught my attention:

    by any means, method or technology, **whether now known or hereafter created**

Why is this even legal anywhere ? How does one consent to something that is unknown at the time of signing?

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The latter is common place. For example, if a film photographer sells a photo, later the rights-purchaser can digitize it.

The advent of AI has obviously changed the game, but "you get to do whatever you want with my work for $XXX" is established.

The issue here is the payments are not $XXX, they are potentially pennies or zero.

Indeed, I was thinking of the whole new AI mess going on when I wrote that. I guess it is indeed commonplace, but so is the

    by continuing to use this product you agree to whatever we wrote here

I believe legislature is the only way this has a hope of ever going away.

Here's the Facebook equivalent:

Permission to use content that you create and share: Some content that you share or upload, such as photos or videos, may be protected by intellectual property laws. You retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (things such as copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and other Meta Company Products that you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want. However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a "License") to use this content. *This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above.* 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 licence 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)*.

https://m.facebook.com/legal/terms

This is considerably more narrow than the Spotify ToS.

The lack of that kind of clause resulted in a lot of shows having to replace all the music they'd licensed when they later tried to release their works on VHS, DVD, and again on streaming services. A famous example being Daria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria) which ran on MTV and just used whatever songs were popular at the time. Licensing issues kept the show from being released on DVD for ages and when it finally did, it came with an apology letter explaining why all the songs had been replaced with generic music.

> I wonder how much ... is actually necessary for the service to function in the first place.

Probably more than you might think. IANAL but the general operation of Spotify-like service, which I'd summarize as "making creative content digitally available to any user, anywhere in the world, on demand" requires a lot of that.

> Why is this even legal anywhere ?

I attribute it to:

- our hilariously primitive and archaic "implementation" of "democracy" (which most formal/legal matters are invisibly downstream of)

- our hilariously primitive and non-self-aware culture(s), whose individual members tend to be more inclined to insist on maintaining the very status quo that they constantly complain about (and from which mostly everything else is downstream of)

- our hilariously primitive and archaic system of "journalism", which is supposed to, and proclaims itself to, expertly inform the public of important goings on

- the magnitude of the gap between the content and nature of reality vs what we believe/proclaim it to be

- some other things that I have surely missed, or am too lazy to generate by spending more time thinking

- some other things that <redacted>

I wonder if any of these predictions are correct.

That’s a hilariously primitive and archaic auto-ironic comment.

I encourage you to expand on this to the ultimate of your ability.....I'm talking really let me have it, please.

I look forward to being impressed, and having a new, superior standard to work towards.

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