There’s been some discussion and a lot of misinformation going around about the Bluesky terms of service. A chunk of it has been centered on the content license grant (with claims like “Bluesky currently owns everything you post”):
By making any User Content available through the Services, you hereby grant to Bluesky and its subsidiaries, affiliates, licensee, successors, and assigns (the “Bluesky Parties”) an irrevocable, non-exclusive, perpetual, transferable, worldwide, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense (through multiple tiers of sub-licensing), to use, copy, modify, adapt, crop, edit, creative derivative works, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform and otherwise exploit in any media now known or hereafter devised, your User Content, in whole or in part, in connection with (i) providing the Services and Content to you and to others; (ii) promote and market Bluesky and our Services, including without limitation through Bluesky’s owned, operated, and/or branded social media channels.
First, this is not “ownership”1. You are giving a license, not transferring ownership of your content; earlier in the TOS, Bluesky is very clear about this:
Except for any licensed rights granted under these Terms, Bluesky does not claim any ownership rights in any User Content and nothing in these Terms will be deemed to restrict any rights that you may have to use and exploit your User Content.
The license terms are quite standard for commercial Internet companies handling user-generated content. Seriously — compare them to Facebook, Twitter, etc., and you’ll find very similar language. Bluesky is also a US-based company, so the terms in the TOS are rooted in US contract and copyright law; some of the language has specific legal meaning in that context.
I am not a lawyer, let alone your lawyer, but I do have an above-average lay understanding of copyright law2, so I’d like to try to explain what this license is doing and why it isn’t as scary as it looks.
Each piece of the license grant is also important. Let’s look at them one by one:
- Irrevocable
- I’m not entirely sure the role this one plays. My best guess is that it’s to prevent needing to build support for knowing about and responding to whatever revocation mechanisms people might try to employ with severe legal consequences for failing to do so; possibly also to protect against weaponized revocation (revoke in some way they don’t expect but the law recognizes, then sue).
- Non-exclusive
- This protects you! Your license to Bluesky is non-exclusive — you can post the same content to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, your blog, the back pages of People, or wherever, because you haven’t given Bluesky exclusive distribution rights.
- Perpetual
- Not sure, expect the same as irrevocable (both terms frequently appear in agreements like this, I expect there’s some litigation that makes them subtly different and both necessary to avoid potential problems).
- Transferrable
- If someone buys Bluesky-the-company, but the rights are not transferrable, then the buyer wouldn’t have the necessary legal rights to keep operating the service.
- Worldwide
- This one is relatively straightforward: Bluesky can distribute your content anywhere in the world.
- Royalty-free
- Bluesky can do all of this without paying you royalties. Monetization is good, and it’d be neat to see innovation in that space, but explicitly documenting that no royalties are required for using and distributing your content avoids legal ambiguity. Further, in the US, some things are subject to compulsory licensing (e.g. paying royalty fees to a designated central agency for certain types of copyright-restricted activities, and they’re supposed to distribute the appropriate rigthsholders), so I expect this is also making sure anything that would ordinarily fall under a compulsory licensing regime is exempt from royalties.
- Right to sublicense
- This one’s interesting, I think. The way I understand it, it’s necessary in order for TOS agreements on the distribution side of the content to work. You license your content to Bluesky under the terms in the TOS; Bluesky licenses it to users under a more restrictive set of terms (also in the TOS). That’s a sublicense! Further, by having the right to sublicense, Bluesky can revise their license for users to use content (hopefully for the better), without renegotiating the terms with users on the content provision side. If it was more strict — you agree that Bluesky can license the content to users under terms X — then changing terms X, even to provide better protection for content prdoviders, is more difficult. This gives them freedom to operate on consumer-side terms. It also opens the door on the API and federation terms, which (so far as I know) haven’t been ironed out yet. The license you give Bluesky now wouldn’t cover making the content avialable, with appropriate licensing terms, via an API or the federation protocol if those are governed by different terms than the end-user consumer terms. Now, accepting the license is trusting Bluesky to be reasonable about what it does with licensing to consumers, API clients, and federated servers. But the alternatives are a mess.
- Use
- Vague, but relatively non-problematic.
- Copy
- Copying is one of the fundamental things restricted by copyright law. If they cannot copy the content, they can’t run the service at all.
- Modify, adapt, crop
- Social media platforms need to modify content in various ways to operate: crop, blur (e.g. to blur filtered content), resize, recompress, etc. This gives them the right to do so. It probably also covers things like integrating with machine translation services for handling multilingual content.
- Create derivative works
- What constitutes a “derivative work” in the US can sometimes be pretty murky, so this clears up the issue by giving them the right to make them. It’s clearly needed for things like the marketing use cases (e.g. a banner image in the app store showing a screenshot of the skyline with real content); there are also questions like “is the skyline a derivative work of the content?” (unlikely, but I don’t know that it’s been definitely answered). If they have the right to make a derivative work, then it doesn’t matter whether something is or not in terms of their rights to do it.
- Distribute, publicly display, publicly perform
- You want them distributing your content, don’t you? Public display and performance are also two specific things in US copyright law (e.g. the right to distribute copies of sheet music does not grant the right to publicly perform the composition), so this makes sure everything’s covered.
- Otherwise exploit
- This is very broad, and perhaps objectionable, but I see it as another “make sure your bases are covered” thing, particularly as important intersections of copyright and technology have yet to be fully legislated or litigated. For example: is training ML models to detect adult content so they can apply the appropriate flags to enable users to opt in or out of having it in their feed covered by one of the other specific rights granted? If not (and so far as I know, US copyright law is not clear), it’s covered by this.
- In any media now known or hereafter devised
- This enables future portability across protocols, media structures, etc. — basically, Bluesky’s rights aren’t limited to the Internet as currently constituted, but they can evolve to stay relevant as technology changes without the content license going away.
- In whole or in part
- They don’t have to use the whole thing — snippets are ok, single posts from a thread, etc.; don’t have to litigate what the unit of licensing is (a post? a thread? a whole profile? do they have to always make sure the image is there with the text in every format possible?).
There are then two important limiting conditions — these rights are given in two context:
- For actually operating Bluesky
- For marketing Bluesky
From my read of the license, I don’t think we’re giving them these rights in any other contexts.
The license might be overbroad in some ways, but it is very standard language for user-contributed content licenses in the US legal context, and as near as I can tell removing any one of them would unhelpfully limit Bluesky’s ability to provide, innovate, and market the service, or expose them to legal liability for doing so.
There also might be simpler ways to handle some of it. Just licensing having users license content under CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA) and relying on that grant would solve some of the problems the license is intended to cover, but it would also severely restrict the types of content people are willing to provide (e.g. photographers would only provide photos they’re willing to license under those terms, instead of sharing copies of things they offer for commercial licensing). The NC and ND license terms wouldn’t work, because Bluesky is trying to operate commercially (as a public benefit corporation) and because lots of things might constitute derivative works.
One more thought before I conclude: I expect a number of Fediverse servers are exposing themselves to some legal liability by not having terms of use that cover many of the things that the Bluesky terms (and the terms of every other commercial social network) are designed to cover.
There are things to be worried about, like the binding individual arbitration. I don’t think the content license grant is one of them.