[HN Gopher] Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable
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Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable
Author : zdw
Score : 175 points
Date : 2024-02-16 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mwl.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mwl.io)
| sneak wrote:
| I'm waiting for these sorts of unilateral "we have updated our
| terms of service, by doing nothing, you agree to these new terms"
| contractual edicts get eliminated as a whole class of behavior.
| I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure if it stops when enough of them
| get invalidated in court, or ifwhen the legislature steps in.
|
| It's insane that it's accepted as normal that someone can send
| you an email with notice of a contract being altered (without
| even including those changes in the email) and you are deemed to
| have agreed to this new contract without even seeing it or taking
| any action whatsoever.
|
| Companies that do this are shitty, and the people that run them
| are shitty people.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Getting an email sounds quite courteous. Most companies just
| put an extra sentence some in the footer along the lines of
| "these terms can be updated anytime without prior notice. check
| back here every 20 minutes, if you want to know about it, lol"
| (HN has this too btw - which makes sense for accounts without
| email. Not so polite regarding the other accounts.)
| roughly wrote:
| I mean, the whole premise of end-user license agreements is
| insane - "By using our product, you, a technically and legally
| unsophisticated user, assert that you have read, understood,
| and agree to the 45 pages of legalese that we put in front of
| you in a 300x200px window, and we assert that we believe that
| you, a technically and legally unsophisticated user, fully
| understood that contract, despite our metrics collected on the
| length of time between it showing up on your screen and you
| hitting the 'Accept' button suggesting that you're some kind of
| hyper-optimized button-clicking robot."
|
| It's very clear that that construct's been allowed to
| facilitate rapid business transactions over any particular
| legal clarity or protection, so I wouldn't expect this behavior
| to face any additional challenges.
| hash872 wrote:
| Agreed. Here's my question (because I'm assuming Spotify's ToS
| also includes mandatory arbitration):
|
| What happens if you try to challenge insanely overbroad terms
| in arbitration? Because you almost certainly signed away your
| right to sue. I'm not super-worked up about attorneys putting
| the most restrictive language that they can in a contract,
| knowing that in 'real' court a judge will simply throw a bunch
| of it out for being unconscionably one-sided. But if you never
| get a real court hearing, but instead are shunted into
| arbitration..... Do judges in arbitration even assess
| unconscionability?
| eadler wrote:
| Arbiters have the same _power_ as judges in court and could,
| in theory, rule the contract unconscionable. In practice,
| arbiters are less likely to do so because
|
| - they don't realise they are allowed to do so.
|
| - they are biased towards the businesses who pay them.
|
| - it potentially invalidates the entire contract.
|
| - one of the only valid reasons to appeal an arbitration
| award is "going outside the terms of the contract". If the
| arbiter invalidates portions of the contract then it
| potentially opens the entire decision up for appeal.
|
| The _really_ weird part of arbitration is that you 're
| allowed to delegate "arbitrability" itself to the arbiter
| (whom may rule that it must go back to court)
|
| I haven't come across any specific studies but this is my
| understanding from my reading [0] (n.b. I am not a lawyer).
|
| [0] https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/references/
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _because I 'm assuming Spotify's ToS also includes
| mandatory arbitration_
|
| Yep, they do (of course). It's in the very first section of
| the terms and, surprisingly, in all capitals so you can't
| miss it (assuming someone reads the terms, which, who ever
| really does).
|
| The fun part of their forced arbitration clause is this
| friendly reminder:
|
| > _IN ARBITRATION THERE IS LESS DISCOVERY AND APPELLATE
| REVIEW THAN IN COURT._
| SebFender wrote:
| "Accordingly, you hereby grant Spotify" what ever they want.
|
| Crazy.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In many countries, including the USA, if a business writes a
| contract containing something unreasonable, and the consumer
| signs it without reading or understanding it, then that clause
| (or maybe the whole contract) is invalid.
| ziddoap wrote:
| In many countries, especially the USA, good luck winning that
| battle against Spotify or similar, unless you are just
| absolutely loaded and want to piss away money.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't think that's true in the US. It would help if we had
| something authoritative, or an attorney in this field.
| HillRat wrote:
| If you've ever been involved in ToS drafting, you're used to
| customers panicking over clauses that you and your attorneys
| crafted to deal with pretty standard business requirements, such
| as granting adaptation rights so you can create thumbnails or
| summaries of user-generated content, for example.
|
| This ... is not that. This is _facially_ overbroad, lacks any
| kind of even indicative usage limitations, and likely breaks a
| lot of standard negotiating and contracting for authors within
| the publishing (and related) industries. While I 've seen bad and
| overbroad adhesion contracts that were cut-and-paste jobs not
| created by actual counsel, I don't think I've seen something this
| audacious that went through legal review. It's predatory.
| wrs wrote:
| "Training" in these things comes across differently than it did
| two years ago (i.e., employee training)! And what is "modeling"
| supposed to mean?
|
| This actually reads much like the typical internet ToS of 20
| years ago, before it became standard to say "only as needed to
| provide the specific services" because people started
| rightfully freaking out.
|
| Especially in the media world with its history of repeatedly
| bilking artists out of royalties whenever a new format comes
| around, this is quite an insensitive move.
| nusl wrote:
| They're gonna eat your work to generate AI-voiced audiobooks
| HillRat wrote:
| That's one thing -- if you took a contract signed ten years
| ago that granted "training" rights and tried to use that for
| "AI training," a judge would likely find that customary
| business usage has changed in that time and there was no
| "meeting of the minds" to support a grant of AI training
| rights. Take that same language and sign a contract with it
| today ... different story. (Interesting question for contract
| lawyers: if you take the contract from a decade ago and
| execute it today, does the usage at the time of contract
| drafting control, or the usage at signing? One would assume
| time of signing, but for an adhesion contract that might not
| have undergone substantive changes I think there's an
| interesting argument that the interpretation most favorable
| to the signer controls. Probably some case law out there
| addressing this.)
| arp242 wrote:
| > Take that same language and sign a contract with it today
| ... different story.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure about that; do non-tech people
| commonly understand "training" to mean "training of AI
| models"? I don't have a poll to prove it, but I would
| expect not.
| naitgacem wrote:
| 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?
| dannyw wrote:
| 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.
| naitgacem wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| hk__2 wrote:
| That's a hilariously primitive and archaic auto-ironic
| comment.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| lozenge wrote:
| 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
| verall wrote:
| This is considerably more narrow than the Spotify ToS.
| macksd wrote:
| I was just seeing something about this on social media -
| @laura_horowitz_narrator was talking about it and one of the
| commenters claim they have backpedaled and apologized for
| "confusing language" but I don't find the language confusing at
| all. If you're a lawyer and you're modifying an existing document
| to state these terms, what else could you possibly be meaning?
| nusl wrote:
| Their apology is more of a "Sorry, we'll find a way to screw
| you in an unmodified way but we'll make sure that you idiots
| will cry less about it this time."
|
| Or they'll introduce softer changes, let everyone kinda chill
| out a bit, then clamp down on the same changes again when it's
| harder to move off-platform and users have little choice but to
| agree.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Public-relation spin like that is almost as despicable as the
| original terms themselves.
|
| The quoted clause, as you stated, was absolutely perfectly
| clear! There was no vagueness or room for confusion. They
| covered every possible way that they now have full control over
| the authors works.
|
| The next draft will probably just have more legalese, and be
| spread out over multiple clauses of their already long (~7500
| word) terms of service so that it's harder to point at it and
| say "gross".
| avgcorrection wrote:
| We tried to rip you off but you called us out. We're sorry
| about that.
| montjoy wrote:
| Meta wanted more LLM training data from us and we caved.
| Whoopsie.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| This is tangential, but the author's audiobook "Savaged by
| Systemd" sounds hilariously bizarre:
|
| > The classic work of Linux satirical erotica, complete and
| unabridged, now a Tilted Windmill Press exclusive!
|
| > ... The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost
| everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init.
|
| > So Systemd comes for Terry.
|
| > Wearing skin-tight leather pants.
| perihelions wrote:
| And that's enough HN for today.
| ufo wrote:
| Sounds like something Chuck Tingle would write.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Pounded in the root by a Systemd
| SahAssar wrote:
| SIGKILL:ed in the stdin by systemd: A proc erotica
| thimp wrote:
| Is it a love story? Is it a horror story? We will never know!
| striking wrote:
| I mean, if you really want to know... here's an Amazon
| review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-
| reviews/R2W2GI082RE884/re...
|
| Both the review and the sample of the book available through
| the book's marketplace listing leave me unable to describe
| either of them with any single word other than "inspired".
| agshekeloh wrote:
| As the author, I cannot recommend reading this tale. I must
| say, however, that the reviews are an art form in and of
| themselves and will reward ten minutes of your time.
|
| That review you cited was clearly written by someone who
| felt personally attacked. I have theories.
| thimp wrote:
| Poettering got drunk and read it?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I defied your warnings and read your tale. I got some
| good laughs out of it. Well done!
| xanderlewis wrote:
| That's brilliant.
|
| ...not entirely related, but reminds me of this:
| https://wiki.wlug.org.nz/POSIX_ME_HARDER).
| Fraterkes wrote:
| IANAL but this seems like a textbook example of the kinde of tos
| abuse that will not be enforcable. "If you click this checkbox
| you give us usage rights of your IP in perpetuity for free".
| autoexec wrote:
| If you're an independent author do you think you'd have the
| money and resources to go up against Spotify's team of lawyers?
| Spotify has literal billions in assets and sadly, the legal
| system in the US is often pay to win.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| You're correct that in practical terms, nobody is likely to
| fight this. But that is kind of orthogonal to the question of
| whether the clause will be upheld if someone _does_ fight it.
| HillRat wrote:
| I'm not sure that I'd bet on this being found unconscionable,
| especially since it's a grant _to_ Spotify, not a _restriction_
| on the customer, which is where most of the existing case law
| (AFAIK) rests. The argument, from Spotify 's point of view, is
| that its customers are freely signing a contract to distribute
| their audiobooks through Spotify's marketplace, and they are
| choosing to accept ... whatever the fuck it is Spotify's trying
| to do with that clause. It's ugly, very very ugly, but probably
| a valid contract.
| muwtyhg wrote:
| How can they choose to accept something they are told they
| already accepted by receiving the email?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Isn't this kind of crap in basically every TOS though? These
| things are written by company counsel to be as one-sided as
| possible and to grab as much as possible. "We give ourselves
| the right to do anything we want, forever, worldwide, and
| permanently, and you waive everything you have, forever,
| permanently." Sprinkle in a severability clause, so that
| everything the company claims has to be litigated separately,
| and then hit publish. That's every TOS I've ever read.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Terms of service are generally pretty shitty, yes. But this
| is egregiously shitty.
|
| https://tosdr.org/ is a good site to compare. Any service
| over Grade E (Spotify, Facebook, the usual suspects are all
| Es) is (very likely to be) less bad. DeviantArt for example
| is a D, and doesn't include waiving your moral rights among
| some of the other overreach.
|
| Some service terms are actually quite good (DuckDuckGo,
| Mullvad, off the top of my head). Though these aren't content
| sharing platforms so it's not really as fair of a comparison.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Cool site, thanks! So many "Grade E" though. You'd think
| they'd add another Grade F though, to help differentiate
| even greater levels of evil...
| torlok wrote:
| You definitively should do that, but I doubt that it will prevent
| your data from being trained on. It sucks, but that's the reality
| now. I stopped using Spotify a while ago. Never using it again
| for sure.
| jijijijij wrote:
| What's your alternative? I enthusiastically do _not_ care for
| podcasts, news and social "features". Recommendation for a
| just (all the) music, no shenanigans type of service?
| fnimick wrote:
| youtube music? (plus ad-free youtube is included which is
| always nice)
| torlok wrote:
| That's what I use. YouTube on a free account is unusable,
| and I don't trust ad blockers. YouTube Music isn't perfect.
| A lot of songs aren't there or it's a music video version,
| but there's things like concerts, compilations, session
| recordings, covers, people improvising, etc.
| Nilocshot wrote:
| I currently use Tidal, though their player is not as polished
| as Spotify's is unfortunately. Still very usable, just a few
| bugs here and there.
| digging wrote:
| Tidal is a pretty good general music app as a Spotify
| alternative and reportedly pays artists a lot more for
| plays.
|
| I also fairly liked Qobuz, a French service, but ended up
| dropping it because it didn't have the kind of "just play
| something I like" feature that Spotify and Tidal have made
| pretty standard now (daily mixes, etc). I hate the laziness
| of it but I've gotten used to it; there are days/times I
| just want to listen to music of a certain mood while I'm
| working on something and don't want to think hard about
| what to put on.
| criddell wrote:
| I switched from Spotify to Apple Music last year and as far
| as I know, there are no podcasts, news, or social features.
| If those things exist, they aren't in your face like Spotify.
| The library seems to be similar.
|
| Actually, because you can play radio stations and some radio
| stations play news, news is on there.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Won't stop the scraping, but the terms go way beyond AI
| training. They more or less retroactively changed the ToS to
| revoke all your IP rights to a work.
|
| > non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free,
| fully paid, irrevocable, worldwide license to reproduce, make
| available, perform and display, translate, modify, create
| derivative works from, distribute, and otherwise use any such
| User Content through any medium, whether alone or in
| combination with other Content or materials...
|
| I don't know how much of it is enforceable in court, but I
| wouldn't want to take that risk if I hosted anything as an
| indie.
| nusl wrote:
| Spotify lost my sub over this. I knew they were kinda shitty but
| holy shit.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| This is going to significantly disrupt market economies
| (capitalism). It's increasingly hard to see how humans can get
| compensated or incentivized or paid in anyway -- without some
| kind of AI tax that gets redistributed.
|
| It seems like a good way to deal with the copyright infringement
| of current and future AI models -- all revenue is taxed 10% for
| an endowment for the arts.
|
| Is this a crazy idea?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| When artists get mad that their work was used with the aim of
| replacing and impoverishing them, techbros turn their
| schadenfreude up to 11.
|
| When people suggest something like an AI tax, techbros seethe
| about communism.
|
| Since schadenfreude is apparently how society works now, make
| it a 40% tax and dial it up a percent or 10 every time someone
| whines?
| falcolas wrote:
| For the uninitiated, or those who don't want to read the article,
| Findaway Voices is the pipeline for getting new audiobooks into
| Spotify. It connects authors with narrators and arranges for
| profit sharing or up-front payments.
|
| Much like ACX with Audible.
| 1f60c wrote:
| The clause quoted in TFA is broad, but fairly standard
| (businesses need it to provide their services). The moral rights
| stuff is interesting, though, and I'm also not sure what
| "[n]othing in these Terms prohibits any use of User Content by
| Spotify that may be taken without a license." means.
| ryandrake wrote:
| In case anyone, like me, has never heard the legal jargon
| "Moral Rights" before, here you go[1].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
| verall wrote:
| This clause is not fairly standard. This clause is similar to
| clauses in other services but is considerably worse.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Tech companies usually become a monopoly before to turn shit,
| Spotify just went straight to be shit
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is an excessively broad grant in the tos, and is absolutely
| absurd.
|
| Under this tos if I were an author and read a book for the audio
| book spotify could:
|
| 1. Use my voice for a reading of Mein Kampf, Turner Diaries, etc.
| advertise it and not compensate me.
|
| 2. Sell an AI version of my voice such thst its indistinguishable
| for any book, for no compensation.
|
| 3. Have some kind of ai generated versions of my book sold, for
| no compensation.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| For any such agreement, look for a clause that says they can
| change it at any time. If the other party can change the contract
| at will, you have no contract. Unforunately, most agreements I
| see with commercial vendors, especially privacy agreements, say
| that.
|
| Then look for clauses that say, 'we can do A or B or C specific
| things, or anything we deem necessary in order to ...'. Again,
| there's no effective contract.
|
| IANAL, so maybe there are some benefits. I wonder how much you
| can argue that what they do with the data you provided on Jan 14,
| 2022, depends on the agreement in force then.
| kderbyma wrote:
| Spotify has been on a path of self destruction for quite some
| time...at least 6 months minimum....
|
| so this is not a surprise...this the saga of the swan song they
| started when they lost the plot and chased after shortcuts
| instead of value.
| digging wrote:
| I doubt that. Spotify has always been an immoral company and
| gets worse and worse over time because it's making them money.
| They're not going to self-destruct when they're the default app
| for streaming Joe Rogan's bad takes directly into the average
| person's head.
| neilv wrote:
| If Spotify has gone bad, we can stop using Spotify, and tell
| others why.
|
| In a regulation-averse environment, about the only thing I know
| that the public can do about abusive corporations is to act on
| principle with individual behavior, in large numbers.
| digging wrote:
| Spotify has gone bad a long time ago. Hell, Spotify was born
| bad. This is about a _new way_ that Spotify is deciding to be
| bad.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I loved this line from TFA:
|
| "But exposure," some folks will say. People die of exposure.
| withinrafael wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer but the Voices terms from ~2017 [1] seem
| similar. It feels like the Spotify terms are clearer (e.g., what
| does "to use" really mean?).
|
| > [...] Voices shall be free to use or disseminate such Content
| for the purpose of promoting the audio recordings of its works
| either by Voices, its affiliates, or its partners, and you grant
| Voices an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive
| license to use, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display,
| distribute, and market such Content (including in digital form).
| You represent and warrant that you have proper authorization for
| the worldwide transfer and processing among Voices, its
| affiliates, partners, and third-party providers of any
| information that you may provide on the Site.
|
| [1]
| http://web.archive.org/web/20190115070453/https://my.findawa...
| tintor wrote:
| Why would they include this?
|
| `you also agree to waive, and not to enforce, any "moral rights"
| or equivalent rights, such as your right to object to derogatory
| treatment of such User Content`
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