Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

This sort of agreement keeps on popping up. Again and again.

The most forgiving reading of the intent of this sort of agreement is that "it is the basic function of a web browser to transfer your stuff across the internet, and it is the basic function of a website to do stuff like make thumbnails of your images and send them to people looking at your stuff, and you are cool with us doing this" but it always ends up being written in the most incredibly grabby way possible, demanding a perpetual, irrevocable license for all potential future uses so that you can't sue if one thumbnail gets forgotten when you delete your stuff or because it got turned into a new format or something.

And this kind of license just happens to cover other stuff nobody thought of at the time like "we can totally train an AI on everything you generate and let people ask it to generate work explicitly derivative of your work without owing you a single cent". Which is a total dick move. So's stuff like "track everything you do and share that data with a distributed surveillance industry that sprung up around advertising". And eventually some asshole comes along and says "hey I could make a lot of money doing this thing that everyone "agreed" to when they scrolled down that lengthy terms of service and hit OK".

I worked at deviantArt back in the early 2010s, they notably had a user agreement that did not claim any rights more than necessary, and it was revocable by the user without jumping through hoops. So it's not necessary to do things this way, companies do it intentionally because they don't care about the rights of their users.

The corollary to this is that companies do this because they are incentivised to do so by their very fundamental goal - to make profit. Whatever pressure that does not lead to a loss on the quarterly report is, in practice, no pressure at all. If we truly want these predatory practices to stop, we have to start promoting different incentives, different priorities, and by 'we' I really mean 'each and every one of us collectively'.

I don't think there's any point saying this without suggesting how to do it. "We should betterify things" is not worth saying.

I am building a company that accepts user generated data, and one surprising struggle is getting my lawyers to stop writing shitty, overbroad, abusive TOS. They are just so used to it, and all the templates and boiler plate is designed to give me everything and the user nothing. And if I want to do better by ny users I have to fight and cajole my own lawyers and pay extra for them to do the extra work of writing terms that aren’t predatory because that is unusual and custom.

It sucks.

Wishing you luck, you are doing some good work putting in the effort to respect the data of the user, something which stands out in a seas full of companies who do not care.

> It sucks.

It depends on your perspective surely? As a lawyer your job is typically to protect your client from legal risk, so if users are happy to sign a really expansive set of terms (which experience shows is the case) that gives grants lots of permission to do stuff with their data then that's low risk. If you as a business don't want that then you need to make it explicit that you're willing to take on some extra risk.

Also by using “standard boilerplate” they are using language with meanings well established by precedent. Craft your own version in “regular English” and it’s much more open to litigation.

But didn't DeviantArt ultimately decide to opt-in every work hosted on the platform to train its generative AI?

Eventually they sold out. Literally and figuratively.

I definitely recall uproars over DA doing this exact same kind of overreach in their TOS! Possibly before you were around, doing the math on my user page there saying "deviant for 22y" tells me I opened my account there in 2003.

This just seems like the right approach. It's never going to be safe to claim the rights to user uploaded content without verifying they hold the rights to it in the first place.

Companies do it because lawsuits are "explosive", if the Chrome team fucks up, they can bring down not only Chrome, but potentially the entirety of Google itself.

Deviant Art's only product is Deviant art, so the upside in goodwill from a user-friendly agreement might be greater than the downside of some remote possiblity of a lawsuit. This isn't true about Google, which has many other products and revenue streams.

Mozilla doesn't need a "license" to everything you transmit over the internet in order for Firefox to facilitate transmitting it over the internet. In fact, Mozilla should never be able to touch things I transmit over the internet using Firefox. They only need a "license" if they are planning on wiretapping me and they want it to be legal.

IANAL but at least in some EU countries you can't give away all rights preemptively for usecases not yet known at the time. So a blanket giveaway doesn't necessarily include AI training (it is a different question if the people performing that act actually care).

It's important to remember that no matter what they write in the agreement, they can will still be sued, and they can and may still be found at fault. So the utility of edge case disclaimers are questionable at best, and indicate 'evil' intent at worst.

america’s litigation problem is really not about google specifically , rather a broad cultural issue. Perhaps the internet age has outgrown industrial age laws, or maybe america just sucks (Grandma saw segregation, suppression of woman’s suffrage, use of nuclear weapons vs Japan), or maybe maximizing self interest is fundamental to nature.

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