Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

• Frontpage

  455 48 4.3 PHP

  Dynamic ToS;DR CMS, used in our frontpage

  

• terms-and-conditions

  1 10 8.2

  Terms and conditions for Tailscale

  

Tailscale does this! https://github.com/tailscale/terms-and-conditions

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• dmca

  184 5,411 9.9 DIGITAL Command Language

  Repository with text of DMCA takedown notices as received. GitHub does not endorse or adopt any assertion contained in the following notices. Users identified in the notices are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Additional information about our DMCA policy can be found at

  

I don't know why you're arguing with me when I'm literally giving you sources backing up that what I'm saying is a mere statement of fact: contracts are inherently subject to copyright law like any other text, although the individual violation may be hard to demonstrate and cases difficult to win.

If I understand your example correctly, you would take an existing SaaS's ToS (i.e. copy their copyrighted work), publish it as your own (i.e. lie) and then file a DMCA takedown request (i.e. commit perjury) to force them to remove their ToS? Yes, you could do that. But since you likely can't demonstrate that you're the original copyright holder (e.g. trivially their SaaS pre-dates your service and they probably have internal documents like e-mails surrounding the drafting of the ToS whereas you don't unless you forge those as well) and sending a DMCA takedown request for works you don't actually own is literally a felony crime, I don't think that's a winning strategy.

To be clear: yes, there are laws against abusing DMCA takedown requests, precisely because otherwise anyone could just send them out for fun. Specifically DMCA takedown requests include a statement under penalty of perjury from the copyright holder that they hold the copyright. So this isn't a special DMCA law but just a boring old felony crime involved in fraudulently filing illegitimate legal claims.

If you're wondering why you've never heard of this it's probably because you're thinking of sites like YouTube which don't actually receive DMCA takedown requests normally but instead provide an arbitration system to allow content owners to avoid messy legal back-and-forths over the back of Google and instead be trusted based on who they are (i.e. smaller creators will be stuck in appeals limbo trying to talk to a human whereas large corporations will usually be trusted by default). This does not however apply to e.g. GitHub, which is why there is a public collection of DMCA takedown requests hosted by them: https://github.com/github/dmca

To speed up this conversation: if you can think of another example where your conclusion is "but this is dumb" then it's likely because your example is, not the legal situation you're looking at. Also "but this is dumb" is not a counter-argument to "this is what the law is like". The law does not care if you think it is dumb and saying it is dumb is not a good defense if you end up in court.

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