User Power
Value/Post Ratio
350%
- Feb 13, 2015
- 6
- 21
- 30
This is a common misunderstanding. PayPal needs those rights to actually host your content on their website. If you didn't grant them those rights you would be able to sue them for illegally using your content. There was a similar discussion about the user agreement on Reddit a while back and this is what the then CEO stated about the legal language in the agreement:
BTW the source you posted is cryptocoinsnews.com. Not exactly a bastion of unbiased reporting when it comes to a direct competitor like PayPal.
I'm no lawyer and I would certainly advise anyone who does business with PayPal to do their due diligence but these types of things are rarely so black and white.
The key here is that when you post something to a website, we need the right to display that content. The act of displaying it constitutes “reproducing” your work, and many of the actions (thumbnailing, quoting for previews or summaries, etc) may constitute preparing derivative works.
You end up seeing this claim everywhere and it is packed with pretty intimidating legal terms so I want to parse it down. The individual components mean this:
- royalty-free: we don’t have to pay you to display the post/comment that you posted on reddit.
- perpetual: the right to display what you posted doesn’t disappear after some specified time.
- irrevocable: once you posted it, you can’t just say “hey wait, no, you can’t display that.” (In practice though, we allow you to delete it, but in case we do not successfully delete it or remove it fast enough, we wouldn’t want there to be legal liability associated with that)
- non-exclusive: THIS IS IMPORTANT - non-exclusive means that you retain the rights to what you posted, i.e. you can still publish it elsewhere, and you own the copyright. We are just claiming a license to display it in addition to your own rights. This is something that has come up a lot – people often wonder when we claim such a wordy and broad license to their contributions whether they still retain rights to it: you absolutely do. You can take your own stuff and make it into a book, or republish it on your website, or anything you want. We just retain a non-exclusive license to be able to display the content you wrote on reddit.
- unrestricted, worldwide: these rights aren’t restricted to e.g. the United States, because anyone in the world might use reddit, so we need to be able to do that in any country.
- derivative works, copies, publicly display: as noted in another comment, thumbnails are derivative works, but e.g. we might make a shirt with some popular meme derived originally from a funny comment or something (e.g. “send photo”).
- authorizing others to do so: we may need to pass the content through any number of service providers in the course of doing business. The biggest one is CDNs, who redistribute/cache our content through edge networks to servers closer to you in order to reduce latency and load on our origin servers.
BTW the source you posted is cryptocoinsnews.com. Not exactly a bastion of unbiased reporting when it comes to a direct competitor like PayPal.
I'm no lawyer and I would certainly advise anyone who does business with PayPal to do their due diligence but these types of things are rarely so black and white.
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