Medium Opens Signups To All | Hacker News Reader

Medium Opens Signups To All

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From the terms of service:

"By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a non-exclusive worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to utilize all copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future with respect to your User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the future, as well as to do anything else that is reasonably appropriate to our Service and its use of your User Content (including, but not limited to, use of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the contributor). The license has no restriction as to the medium, dissemination method, type of Service we may offer, or the type of systems or products that may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

Anyone went into this fully conscious about this aspect? Do you feel it's reasonable?

To be honest, at this point I think I'd rather pay for a service and keep ownership.

Wow after reading that, they might as well have written: "We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, with everything you put here, regardless of anything that happens".

That's a disgusting license. However, it reflects in the content they have. I've never read anything useful on Medium. It's mostly just blog posts complaining about random things (of course, I'm subject to selection bias in that the Medium posts I see are those linked from HN or Twitter).

There was a long discussion about this ~2 months ago. Most of this wording is necessary for them to do business, if overly formal legalese.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347673

Thanks for the link. The issue is discussed repeatedly in that thread, and according to some posters the "license" they want is needed to show the content on their site in the first place. Interesting.

Still. The company that manages my server has no terms like that. It's all my responsibility, to roam all of freedom-land until I'd reach a border called the Law, with no lecturing on rules in-between (if you read around the terms & service page)!

Your VPS provider is operating according to common-carrier provisions. It's a bit like the postal system, or safety-deposit boxes--since you manage the software, and they only handle things as raw disk blocks/IP packets and below, they don't need a license to them.

Well, not in the slightest. Let's try:

"a non-exclusive worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to utilize all copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future with respect to your User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the future, as well as to do anything else that is reasonably appropriate to our Service and its use of your User Content (including, but not limited to, use of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the contributor)."

With this license, Medium can bind all your blog posts into a dead-tree book, put your name on the cover in giant font, sell it in Barnes and Noble, and give you not one cent for it.

Now let me edit this a bit...

"You give Medium a non-exclusive copyright license to display your content worldwide."

How could anyone host your content on their servers without a license? How could they link to your content from a widget if it wasn't transferable? Is there a comparable TOS that you prefer?

"By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog."

http://en.wordpress.com/tos/

Thanks, I learned that form mrkurt's link to a previous discussion below. Over there they also suggest that Medium's license is a bit more far-reaching than wordpress' license.

Still, maybe a wake up call to check what all those "licenses" and "contracts" that we click-to-agree on all the time mean, and to see if we can't roll our own every now and then.

"The license has no restriction as to [...] type of systems or products that may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

vs.

"solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog."

That's the difference.

So when the official Medium iOS app comes out, they'll have to go back to every single contributor and get them to agree to having their articles published in the iOS app.

And then the iPad app.

And then the Android app.

Would each new app not be covered by "solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog."?

I still don't really get Medium. My current mental picture is that it's something like Pastebin with nice formatting - if you want to post something but you don't want to go to the trouble of setting up somewhere to host it, chuck it on Medium. I can see that being a useful service, but it seems likely to become a commodity (look at all the pastebin alternatives out there), and not vastly easy to make money from.

The interesting and invisible-from-the-outside bit of Medium is the collaborative editing/review system. It's not just a pastebin; it's really laser-focused on editorials and essays.

I always thought its laser-focus was on having overhyped headlines for underwhelming content.

I'm probably not the only one here who added medium.com/* URLs to their subconscious spam filter. This is a smart move on Medium's part to break that perception - or to intensify it, depending on the type of people and posts coming in from now on.

Yep, I too have added Medium to my subconscious spam filter, along with BusinessInsider, TechCrunch and many others.

I have a hard time understanding why some people hate Medium so much. It's probably not ideal for full-time bloggers who wish to monetize their work and have total control, but it's a great platform for casual bloggers and readers. The content there is usually pretty good.

Maybe I'm just missing something obvious, I don't know.

In my case, it's not hate. There was just an endless stream of trite posts that got linked on HN too much.

But if there's real antipathy, it's probably the same mechanism as with Svbtle - except that the more talented bloggers were already on Svbtle, not on Medium. If you make an exclusive platform like that, the perception is that it's made for self-absorbed people by even more self-absorbed people. That's not a good impression to leave behind.

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