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Comment by thelibrarian | Hacker News Reader

If you don’t give them a license to display the works you give them to display, how can they legally display it?

Perhaps the same way that Github works when you host your web page there. I.e. A revocable, limited license, where you retain full ownership, and only grant them permission to host and serve your content + a limited set of other uses, and you dictate external licensing?

Here, drop all your data into this vortex -- we need it for our next web site builder AI model.

Yes, but this is the perfect circle of slop: generate an ai landing page, throw it into cloudflare drop, ai adopts it, start all over again. For genuine, professional content, I would assume, almost no one uses cloudflare drop, as they already have something in place to test and quickly host some page. Moreover, I expect that scammers and phishing campaigns will have a use for it to quickly up some landing page without leaving a large footprint.

It's not like every SaaS wasn't using the same style of landing page before AI.

It states more than just display: 'to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works'

Can this be a necessary legal framing for technical purposes, to allow converting of pictures to different resolutions, or adapt the content to mobile views, and such things?

Unlikely. It goes further by also using the word "exploit".

If they needed permissions for conversion, they'd have made a specific mention of that and thereafter confirmed legal ownership.

TBH, I like that the word “exploit” is in there. It feels more honest and if it were not present!

I mean, even all else aside - why would they need a "perpetual, irrevocable" licence?

To me this looks like legal preparation for selling their users' datasets for AI training purposes.

Basically the same phrasing was widespread before LLMs were invented. So I don't think it's specifically motivated by that.

Hoarding massive amounts of data for the success of machine learning algorithms was a thing long before LLMs were a thing too. Remember the neural networks hype that kicked off around 2010? LLMs didn't even challenge the prevalent paradigms of deep learning: "Most of the value of deep learning is where you can get a lot of data" or "Data is the new oil".

This is more-or-less standard boilerplate from _long_ before the current AI training even existed. It basically means “we can do anything we like with it, now and at any time in the future, including selling it and passing these rights on to anyone else we chose, but don't take ownership so we can't be held responsible for it”.

Officially it means they can legally do wat you want them to do (present the content to users, perhaps transforming it in various ways for some or all viewers), but of course it covers them being able to do far more than that.

Perpetual and irrevocable? And with the right to modify, not just display?

You do not need all that.

and "(with the right to sublicense)"

If my company presented such user agreement I would be quickly reported by users to local Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, audited, fined, and ordered to change that.

I think this would be even challenged at the level of "Abusive clauses registry" that office maintains, so the agreement would be quickly overruled in court.

If no specific clause would be challenged, this is an example of "grossly violates the consumer's interests" rule.

How is big tech allowed to push this shit anywhere? How is this legal in civilized world?

With the right to sublicense. They can literally sell your stuff

Perpetual and irrevocable? Derivative works?

Derivative could just be "let CF append your Google Analytics tag and that funny cursor-follower script.

Perpetual is way harder to justify though.

Derivative works I understand. That would include transforming the content for some/all viewers. Making it mobile-friendly or otherwise reformatting for display, for instance, or adding affordances for accessibility, or for long content adding a generated summary.

Irrevocable and right-to-sublicense are the red flags for me. Nothing a company sells to us is irrevocable, but everything they take from us is expected to be.

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