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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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I'm not sure I would take the analysis of their competition at face value.
It might be for shitty reasons, but it's also a pretty boilerplate clause that's been in online content websites TOS for years.
A post title phrased to make you angry, and a blog post geared to make you angry at the posters commercial competition has too many layers of manipulation to it to make me take it at face value.
Selling an ebook on a marketplace should not give any rights of the contents of the ebook to the marketplace.
The same should be for other niche marketplaces.
Changing the TOS like this is an unfair business practice. Existing published works should have the option of receiving advanced notice of these changes and a long grace period to deny the change and pull their work from the platform.
Not saying that it's right or wrong, just that the source of the info is being manipulative and I don't like that.
"We don't know why they made the change, so it's probably the most extreme thing we can think of that stops short of libel".
Typically the sub rights you grant to the market place are to allow them to display excerpts from the book on the store page, or for things like the transcription they actually mentioned.
I don't think it's being manipulative, because it is extreme
This could mean, they could rerecord your book and sell their recording, or use the recording to make commercials, or any number of things you might find objectionable. There are no limits in the text of the TOS.
If my competitor tried this I would advertise that I don't abuse my customers too.
I don't think either of us are lawyers, so disputing the exact meaning of words in a contract is an invitation to nonsense.
I do know that rerecording and selling the copy would require them to have more copyright rights than would be called a limited license.
It's manipulation because they're overtly stating "we're not sure what they'll do, but it's probably so they can train AI on your books and make infinite shitty clones". That's emotionally manipulative, just like the title of this post.
The site itself has a clause in their public tos that gives them license to "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" the books they publish, they just phrase it in plain English.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how substantial the difference is between the terms. It seems to me like both grant the distributor the right to make copies, sell them, make changes and advertise with the authors works.
This is an advertisement for a platform, trying to make you fear their competition. Any time they seem to make a solid claim, they couch it in a hypothetical or quote someone else. They make it clear that they don't actually know what the license says, just the "plain reading" "appears" "at a glance" "to seem" to have no limits.
It's inflammatory, manipulative, and trying to get right up to the edge of libel without actually doing so.
I'm not a lawyer you are right, but I do deal with CCDC contracts as part of my job. A big part of the scope of a contract is what it includes and what it states it excludes. Exclusions usually come when there is some sort of implied inclusion in another part of the contract, as an example a term like "will be made to interoperate with" might imply a contractor would provide power circuits, licensing, subscriptions etc, and the exclusions would state that recurring expenditures would be outside the scope of the contract or something.
The storyfair terms are specifically referencing and including activities storyfair is accomplishing, and only referencing things that are specifically to accomplish selling the piece of media.
The Spotify terms are granting Spotify partners the ability to use the media in an unlimited and derogatory way, it's specifically including "irrevocable", "sublicencable" and "transferable". These three words are actually huge changes in the terms.
So, I started looking up some words in the legal sense, since "a contract that can't end" seems crazy.
It looks like irrevocable in this context means you can only terminate the license according to the rules agreed upon, not for no reason at any time.
The derogatory bit appears to mean you can't sue them if you dislike one of the minor edits they made.
I'm not a lawyer though, so I'm going to stop trying to interpret license terms, because if nothing else it's far from my original point.
I have no idea if the terms are good or bad, or even when the change happened.
What I do know, is that I would expect more attention given to it if it were as bad as it's being made out to be, and from sources beyond one of their competitors.
I don't trust people using emotionally manipulative language and weasel words to try to persuade me, even if they're entirely correct. (If it's as bad as they say, why not actually get their lawyer to provide an explanation, rather than clarifying that they aren't lawyers and are only guessing?)
Yes I meant to comment further, but my social media timer-blocker thing was about to go off. I'm just as upset at this practice of including, just, the most pernicious clauses imaginable in a contract as "boilerplate" where actually enforcing it would make you front page news, but we're supposed to trust that it's just for their protection.