CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.
Ouch
This is so IP law 101… Unauthorized use for commercial purposes. I hope rightholders fight until the end
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Was that agreement in place 13 years ago when I created my account?
Likely doesn’t make a difference. At any time Reddit can put a banner on their site saying “We’ve updated our terms and conditions, ream more here” and almost always such changes specify that continued use of the site is your consent (but that you can delete your account at any time, not that that appears to even do anything now).
Yeah, really a good will effort to encourage free discussion.