Comment by stymaar
3 days ago
That's the (evil) genius in Meta's terms: they get the right to scrap out of thin air, and the only party liable to the scraping is B.
3 days ago
That's the (evil) genius in Meta's terms: they get the right to scrap out of thin air, and the only party liable to the scraping is B.
IANAL, but copyright binds everyone regardless of entering into any agreement. In that case Meta would still be potentially liable for its infringement, exactly because "thin-air right" is not a thing. B could not grant it, because they don't have it.
A license is a contract or contract term waiving certain rights to sue. That’s what a copyright license is. And yes, you cannot issue a valid license if you don’t have the right to do that.
What these kinds of platform agreements usually say is that you, the licensor, agree that you are fully representing that you can issue that license, and that any infringement is thus your fault and not the platform-licensee’s. Under the DMCA and other sources of law this is plausible.
> What these kinds of platform agreements usually say is that you, the licensor, agree that you are fully representing that you can issue that license, and that any infringement is thus your fault and not the platform-licensee’s.
I know the comment is brief, but it's important to understand what it means when the infringement is 'your fault'.
If it's B's fault that it caused A to infringe on the copyright license of C, then that would be handled by B indemnifying A against a charge from C. C can still sue A, C can still win a suit against A, A would then utilize the contract with B to get reimbursed from B.
If B is small and can't afford to reimburse A, that's A's problem. If B goes out of business, that's A's problem.
In my field, we require this indemnification fairly frequently as we distribute content created by others where it's impossible to fully guarantee that content leaves us with no liability, in a reasonable timeframe of distribution.
We have many processes that give us a best effort to prevent us from distributing content that we would be financially liable for. We have processes where we let things go which are gray area, but the client has posted a bond with us and signed an indemnification agreement sufficient to cover the potential fine we may face if the content was an issue. Or we reject the same content from others who don't have that signed agreement and haven't posted that same bond. Sometimes we sign an agreement without a bond because we've had decades of experience with the client and the number of violations is small enough that we would eat the cost.
1 reply →
IP Lawyer here - no, it's not plausible.
Copyright is strict liability. You do not have to have knowledge or intention to violate copyright, that only goes to the types of damages.
Unintentional copyright violation, or believing you have a license, is not a defense to infringement.
I have no idea what you mean by "under the DMCA and other sources of law it is plausible". The DMCA is irrelevant here, and you give no "other source of law".
But copyright and a "copyright license" are two different things. If B doesn't have the legal right to sublicense C's IP, and Meta scrapes it anyway, then B could be liable for breach of contract, and Meta could be liable for copyright infringement
I hereby grant all HN users and not users the right to copy, modify and redistribute any and all text and binary on the Internet and outside the Internet, already existing or yet to be created, forever and 1 day.
The problem there is that both B and C are pulley much smaller than Meta. Copyright and other IP law at the scale of meta has become something that only really works for those with significant resources.
AFAIK scraping itself doesn't go against copyright, only redistribution matters with respect to copyright (which is why B and C must have an agreement together).
Buying (or stealing) stolen goods is still a crime.