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.
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.
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
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.
Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing itsour data
Fixed 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.
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.
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.
This is why we need better data laws in the US. If I want everything I've ever said on your site to disappear both instantly and forever, I should have that option.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg and Reuters reported that a “large unnamed AI company” — possibly Google — had entered into a licensing agreement worth about $60 million on an annualized basis.
“[Our] data APIs are able to provide real-time access to evolving and dynamic topics such as sports, movies, news, fashion, and the latest trends,” the prospectus continues.
“We believe that Reddit’s massive corpus of conversational data and knowledge will continue to play a role in training and improving large language models.
Content producers, from stock media libraries to news publishers, are increasingly turning to data licensing agreements with AI vendors as chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini threaten to sap traffic.
Vendors, in turn, have been spurred to pursue licensing agreements as they face a deluge of lawsuits alleging that they have no legal justification for training their models on data without permission or payment.
OpenAI, for one, has agreements in place with image gallery Shutterstock as well as publishers including Axel Springer, the owner of Politico and Business Insider.
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