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.
“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.
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.)
> 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.
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?
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
`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`
Yeah that is the worst line. It proves their motives are bad. Moral rights should never be taken, and indeed, cannot be given away in a contract in many countries.
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.
the old TOS limit the usage to a well-defined purpose (promotion) do not claim the rights to
modify and do not make you waive your moral rights to your work
I don't think so, the comma usage seems to isolate the promotional use from the rest.
Part one: 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,
Part two: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)*.
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.
> 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.
- 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
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.
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?
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).
>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.
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.
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.)
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.
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".
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.
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.