- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Our data, you mean?
Our data
Correct, our data.
- Spez
In other news, spez’s compensation from reddit last year was $193 million, and it’s COO got a cool $93 million.
C’mon, spez, tell us again how horrible it’s been that reddit’s never made a profit.
deleted by creator
So Reddit charges users to create content (paid premium or by showing ads). And then it sells that content.
Making money both going and coming.
And it also asks reddit users to invest in reddit
loool
I wonder if there is any legal standing for users to sue Reddit for a fair share of those profits. That’d be nice if it could happen. But i suspect, probably not.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
I’d say Reddit would win.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
Their ToS could say they own you and your children and grandchildren, but that doesn’t make it enforceable.
If I post a frame from the movie Akira on Reddit would any reasonable person suggest that they own not only that frame, but also the entire movie that it came from as a derivative work? There is a glut of second-hand data just like that all over Reddit, Twitter, and every other social media network, and I’m willing to bet that’s also part of what’s being sold.
But hey… I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that the idea that they automatically “own” the things that people post on their website is ridiculous. It’s a bit like UPS or FedEx saying they own the contents of your package while delivering it.
It is true that Reddit does not hold a valid license to content that is
- Sufficiently long-form, unique etc. to be copyrightable, and
- posted by someone other than the copyright holder or someone with a sufficient license.
However, as far as I understand it, the extent to which Reddit—a content provider and social network—is legally required to remedy this is to comply with DMCA requests and review reported content. Perhaps there is a higher standard that I am not aware of?
And yet that exact kind of data is all over reddit in ways that are impractical to enforce by case by case DMCA. How many memes are there using footage from popular shows? How much fanart?
More importantly, is that stuff not included as part of the data that reddit “owns” when they sell their data to tech companies? Because whether a DMCA takedown has been requested on that kind of data or not, doesn’t change the fact that they don’t hold the copyright in the first place. How can they sell things that they don’t even own?
Something smells. The logic of this entire industry doesn’t add up.
The answer is that it’s more practical than any alternative.
Copyright holders can’t sue Reddit for selling access to copyrighted content (before Reddit receives a copyright claim) because there is no way Reddit could reasonably distinguish between original and copyrighted content. Reddit users violate copyright law and the ToS in submitting copyrighted content, and Reddit is only required to take action as they are made aware of the content’s copyright status.
It would be trivially easy to to circumvent Reddit’s ToS otherwise: I could create some original content, sell my copyright to a friend for $1, and immediately put Reddit in violation of copyright law by submitting the content to Reddit. My friend could go after Reddit, and Reddit could go after me, but my friend would likely get more out of Reddit than Reddit could successfully get out of me.
It’s the same reason publishers can’t sue Cloudflare for hosting a piracy website unless they refuse to take it down, nor can they sue Facebook for ad revenue earned from banners placed next to a copy+paste of a New York Times article. The content providers do not knowingly/intentionally violate copyright law, and they make reasonable attempts to prevent/rectify it. Without such limitations on legal standing, the internet becomes a way bigger mess than it already is.
I think you’re conflating two very different things here.
- Reddit _hosting/dissemination user-submitted copyrighted data.
- Reddit licensing/selling copyrighted data to other parties.
The DMCA covers hosting and dissemination. If a user submits copyrighted data to Reddit that they do not own and Reddit unknowingly (because, to be fair, they can’t know what is or isn’t owned or by who), then Reddit is not liable for copyright infringement as long as they comply with DMCA takedown requests from people who claim to own the original IP.
But again, none of that implies that Reddit themselves (or Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) can realistically claim ownership over all of the data that is on their website. The reason they are subject to DMCA at all is because there is a globally shared assumption that data that users submit may or may not be owned by some other party, and while the DMCA protects them from being held liable for simply hosting and disseminating that data, it does not magically make them the owner of all data that hasn’t had a DMCA claim made against it.
In other words, if I post a picture of Homer Simpson on Reddit (and there are many), it is ridiculous for anyone to suggest that they have any intellectual property rights over that picture, that character, any trademarks, etc., whether someone has made a formal DMCA take down request or not. And if they don’t own the picture, the character, the trademark, etc., when what exactly are they selling (licensing) and where did they get the right to sell it?
They might not be liable for just hosting/distributing it, but just like you can’t sell someone else’s car, you can’t license out someone else’s IP.
I see your point, and I’m somewhat inclined to agree with you, but what Reddit is doing doesn’t seem very different from what Meta and friends have been up to for years. Reddit isn’t selling the rights to the content on their platform, nor are they attempting to. They’re effectively selling API access to its content, in bulk, to Google. I don’t see how that is legally distinct from Meta selling (insulated) access to its content via their ad platform. They are both monetizing data that is potentially copyrighted by other parties.
Yeah, probably not. When you sign up and agreed to their ToS, they don’t “own” your content, but you grant them a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use it without compensation.
From their ToS:
Any ideas, suggestions, and feedback about Reddit or our Services that you provide to us are entirely voluntary, and you agree that Reddit may use such ideas, suggestions, and feedback without compensation or obligation to you
Source: A pretty good post on r/HFY, though it is on Reddit, so don’t click it if you don’t want to :P
But how many TOS have been shot down because they over reach? I don’t know. You’re probably right. It it’s still fun to imagine.
… and thats why Wikipedia is non-profit.
Seeing human (even shitpost) achievements get monetized (in the most sucky manner) one by one is sad af.
I hope my fuck Spez comments are useful.
Now AIs will fuck Spez for all eternity.
Millennia from now Fuckspez! will be the standard greeting between all sentient species in the galactic federation. It will be even used in machine code as a handshake for establishing initial contact between two subspace relays.
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Lmao the ratfuck CEO is making his money alright. What a little weaseling coward. He spend so long jealous of his co-founders who got paid and left early, that he probably sees this as his gold parachute.
Reddit says it’s made $203M so far licensing
itsour dataFixed that for them.
There’s your “tragedy of the commons” fallacy on a stick, folks - the proles where managing reddit so well that huffman had to break it in order to make it more vulnerable to the parasites.
It’s data?! You mean our data
“Its”
“licensing”
“made”
“lots”
“/ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\”
Monty Python’s flying circus!
“It’s”
This is helpful of them, once the EU court fines them, we can quickly calculate how much that will be.
These are totally the signs of a stable and profitable company.
I wonder if they will ever consider paying the users for the content they provide that constitutes “its” data. 🤔
The users get a service that costs hundreds of millions to maintain for free.
And no one is forcing them to post valuable content without compensation.Well there’s apparently more than 400 million active users every month, so they could charge users a few cent per month and pay for the infrastructure entirely. But they choose to be massive privacy invading assholes.
If they charged users any amount of money there wouldn’t even be 400000 of them anymore.
Yes there’d be less, but the amount is purely speculative and you don’t know anymore than I do.
Even if they have to go with the ad-supported model to maintain a large active userbase, that can easily be done without all the tracking. But again, they chose the shittiest option…there’s really a pattern of them just being massive assholes. No matter what options they have, they’ll apparently go for the shittiest one that screws over the users the most.
This was my attitude until reddit took away my app. Now the site is the poster child for enshitification
Pay? They are trying to “stonk” Reddit users by asking them to buy stock for the IPO which screams “We want your data and your money!”.
Yeah. They are giving the users the “privilege” to buy shares at the open market rate. Not even at discounted rates. Again US only. What about the others? They just give their data I suppose.
Where’s my cut?
what, you didn’t get the email offering the special stock price?
A good reminder to go back and edit all your comments to [removed] if you didn’t do so when you first left.
I did, and then also deleted my accounts. I can’t believe how much bot content is on there now.
