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Mates, today without warning, the reddit royal navy attacked. I've been demoded by the admins.
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
A fellow mod informed me that about it as I was laying in bed. Reddit sent a message to the mod team and after 1 hour demoded me. I didn't even had time to see it, never-mind respond to it.
Looks like we rattled reddit enough to start shooting. There goes all that fancy talk about our protest not affecting them much.
Just FYI for now. It's late here so I'll see how we proceed tomorrow.
Of course not, from reddit's ToS: "By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content." --https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-12-2021
That's their TOS. Their actions recently — namely undeleting user posts and comments — run directly counter to their TOS. They're essentially claiming ownership of the user submitted content by doing that.
Reddit reserves all the rights to everything you post ("When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, etc., etc.), but you alone are responsible for it ("Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.").
@Lorez "Yes your honor, user ******* gave me all this content and I'm making money out of it, but I have nothing to do with it. I swear"
And it works, see /u/delcake's comment.
Terms of service are pretty much the legal equivalent of graffiti, they are there to look impressive not mean anything. You'll struggle to find any legal rulings based on business to consumer TOS because companies know they are very like to get rejected as unenforceable due to discrepancy between the parties and inability to negotiate.
If reddit are asserting control of content by forcibly publishing it (opening private subs and undeleting comments) then there is a very good chance a judge would see them as being responsible for it.
Welcome to the CCP...
It feels so nice to know most Lemmy instances will never shove that bullshit paragraph in Legalese in our faces.
Does this, from a legal standpoint, absolve them of what is hosted on their servers? Especially when they just took steps to make sure it is open for bussiness?
As any good legal question goes, I imagine the answer is one of the many shades of "It depends."
Ultimately it's going to come down to how accommodating Reddit wants to be if rightsholders lawyers come around demanding an explanation for why Reddit facilitates the piracy of their works. Generally a platform doesn't have liability for infringing content posted on it as long as they are responsive to requests to take it down.
Not a lawyer, so not sure how enforceable reddit's ToS is, but the TL;DR (as I read it) is "you're responsible for everything you post; reddit owns it."
Which is essentially what section 230 has given all social media companies. They are absolved from responsibility from what users post, but own it all and can moderate (or fail to) however they want. Companies have all of the control
We need digital rights
Section 230 (often called the 26 words that created the internet) reads:
Wikipedia also says:
I'm also not a lawyer so I have no clue what the ramifications for this are, but I'm guessing that Reddit isn't liable for stuff people upload as long as the illegal stuff gets removed.
If Reddit undeletes a post, could they be treated as the publisher? At the very least it sounds not very good-samaritan-y of them to do that, so maybe they wouldn't be protected in that case.
BTW, the supreme court heard a few cases centered around section 230 a few months ago! And Biden called for it to be reformed! So depending on how that goes, the internet could get shaken up soon. We're in some interesting times.