Does Fluff Busting Purity violate Facebook&#39;s terms of service? I'm getting annoyed by Facebook reels, sponsored posts, and other elements on Facebook, desiring a means to control them. The most powerful way to control what content appears on Facebook appears to be the Fluff Busting Purity extension. It's an extension designed to customize the appearance of Facebook by removing certain elements, such as reels or sponsored posts. However, according to Wikipedia, Facebook (not surprisingly) hasn't taken too kindly to it in the past, banning the creator in 2012. Wikipedia cites The Next Web as a source, which brings up section 3.11 of the Facebook terms as the likely text at issue: “You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial of service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality.” The Next Web also adds: On the surface, it seems Facebook is well within its rights to shut down the user’s account for violating its ToS, but the developer of the extension / script has a point when he – or she – says a browser add-on does not require an API key or license to access Facebook’s services by design. While the creator of the extension may have been banned, I discovered that the page for the app itself is alive and well: https://www.facebook.com/fluffbustingpurity Would I be violating Facebook's terms if I used F.B. Purity? Update Here is the developer's response: https://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal-team-have-told-me-i-am-banned-from-facebook-because-of-f-b-purity/
It is not obvious that it violates the TOS (which is a complex wall of text and links to chase). §3 states that &quot;we need you to make the following commitments&quot;, followed by some subsections – you can re-interpret this as an agreement on your part to do this stuff. Those subsections relate to &quot;legitimate accounts and users&quot; (not relevant), &quot;what you can do&quot; (potentially relevant), &quot;permissions you give&quot; (granting them license to use your stuff), not infringing on their copyright. The second subsection about what you can &quot;do&quot; says that you can't &quot;violate these or other terms&quot;, or do anything unlawful, or infringing, nor may you upload viruses, or scrape Facebook data. So it turns out that there is nothing specific in that subsection, but it does say that you won;t violate &quot;other terms&quot;. §5 presents a bunch of other possible terms and policies: Community Standards, Commercial Terms, Advertising Policies, Self-Serve Ad Terms, Facebook Pages, Groups and Events Policy, Meta Platform Terms, Developer Payment Terms, Community Payment Terms, Commerce Policies, Meta Brand Resources, Music Guidelines and Live Policies. Those primarily apply to advertisers, group-pages, developers, commercial use and content broadcast via Meta. Community Standard applies to everybody, and as you should predict there is a long list of specific sub-categories such as &quot;Violence and Criminal Behavior&quot;, &quot;Safety&quot;, &quot;Objectionable Content&quot;, &quot;Inauthenticity&quot; etc. You would have to hire a lawyer to do an exhaustive search and interpretation. However, it appears that using an ad blocking app is not forbidden on FB, and that seems to be what that extension is. But you should read it for yourself. All. Of. It. It may have violated the older TOS, but that clause seems to me missing from the present TOS.
It's hard to say, under the Twitter TOS. They do not claim that copyright is transferred to them: &quot;You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content)&quot;. But you do license the content: By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services. The totality of conditions, including the Twitter Rules, is ever-evolving and not apparently contained in a single link. From what I can tell, there is no condition that prohibits a user from copying tweets into a book. There are numerous statements about &quot;respecting copyright&quot; which refer to taking material that is not licensed to Twitter and redistributing: nothing about redistributing licensed material.A plain reading of the first bold sentence says that you can make your content available to the world, not restricted to &quot;retweeting&quot;.
VirusTotal is no different than many internet companies which operate with user-supplied content (i.e. Facebook, Youtube, etc.), and they are no different in the way they protect themselves with a TOS that outlines all aspects of their use of any material contributed or licensed or sold. Their Terms of Service states that users must own the copyright for what they upload and give VirusTotal a license to use it and relicense it and profit from it. VirusTotal uses the &quot;safe harbor&quot; clause of the DMCA to limit their liability for illegal uploads and provide a recourse for users who claim a copyright violation of uploads. And VirusTotal clearly seek to limit their liability for their own service in the case of false positives by standard clauses that claim they &quot;do not warrant or guarantee that the services are accurate, reliable or correct.&quot; They're really no different than many internet companies; read the Terms of Service. It's a legally binding contract for all users, though some jurisdictions may limit some aspects of it.
The part about "If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion" is the problem. Sure, you have the right to request, but you can't legally compel. You have an agreement with them, according to which you got something, and they got something. You can't then take back the thing that you gave them, which is permission to use. You didn't give them the IP itself, which you still hold. Here's an analogy. You may own a car, and can give a person permission to use the car (let's say "if you bring me back a pound of cheese from the store"). You cannot later change your mind (especially after you've gotten the cheese) a say that you retract that permission and therefore they actually stole your car. When permission to use is given, as long as the conditions for granting permission are satisfied, you can't un-give permission.
Such an image is copyrighted, as part of the movie. You cannot legally use it without permission from the copyright holder, unless the use of the image falls under fair use (note that fair use is a strictly US legal concept. It does not apply anywhere else) or a similar exception to copyright, such as "fair dealing". There are multiple factors which must be considered in making a fair use judgement. No one factor ever totally controls the decision. It is a case-by-case decision. But several things about your proposed use suggest to me that it will not qualify as a fair use. The image is part of a creative work, not a work of non-fiction such as a news report or a textbook. That weighs against fair use. You seem to be using the whole image, although it is only part of the movie. That probably weighs against fair use to some extent. A use in "a social media post regarding a sales vacancy" sounds commercial to me. If so, that would weigh against fair use. The copyright owner might well wish to market images from the film. If so, and if many people used images from the film as you propose to use this one, that might harm the market. This weighs against fair use. You don't seem to be making any comment on the image, or using it in any significantly transformational way. That weighs against fair use. Use of the image does not seem vital or even important to the message you intend to communicate. That also weighs against fair use. In short, I think you would be wiser to use an image that you have or can get permission to use in this way. If you use this image, it is possible that the copyright holder would sue for copyright infringement, or issue a DMCA take-down notice, or both.
It could be. Accessing any web page is subject to whatever the terms of use are for the page, and if those terms state that the page may only be accessed from within the US, then accessing the page from outside the US is a violation of the TOS (hence use is infringing): see 2.4(h) of the Netflix EULA. There are EU rules that override such terms, within the EU. The usual way to circumvent technological location-restrictions (where the web page says "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that") is to use a VPN and pretend to be somewhere else. Use of a VPN is not per se illegal in most countries (there are exceptions), but using it to circumvent geo-blocking may be. Again returning to the point that the TOS may itself say "No you may not", the interesting question is what to conclude if there is no such statement, for example I did not see anything in the PBS TOS that restricts access to the US (I didn't look very deeply). Terms of service can't be secret: you can't be held to following rules that you cannot reasonably know of. If you attempt to access a page that uses un-announced geo-blocking technology and it informs you that you can't use the page because of your location, then you have effectively been put on notice that there is a rule. If you happen to be using a VPN and access an un-announced, (reasonably) undetectable geo-blocked site, that would not be a breach of the terms (because you have not been put on notice that location is a term of use).
Primary Theory I suspect there might not be a legal answer to this question. I have always suspected a sort of pseudo-intellectual elitism (or simple preference or carelessness) with passive voice sentence construction in general. I sense license writers have not (yet) escaped this general trend. I would love someone to prove this theory incorrect. But, alas, I doubt it will happen. Alternative Theory But because this is a Law Q&amp;A site, I will advance the following alternative theory. I don't believe it's correct. But I will advance it because it's the only possible explanation I can think of that might be even remotely based on legal reasoning... Maybe they are just basing their construction on the way the law itself is written? For example, if the law says, "Permission must be granted..." Then it would follow that a writer who wants to comply with the law might choose, "Permission is hereby granted..." instead of something like "The authors hereby grant permission..." or, as the OP suggested, "You may..."
Pretty much everything you need to know about the ownership and licensing of your material on Medium is in the Medium TOS you contractually agreed to when you signed up with the service. Basically, you granted Medium a license to use the work, but you did not agree to an exclusive license nor turn over copyright to them. Part of that Terms of Service – Medium Policy reads: Content rights &amp; responsibilities You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium. By posting content to Medium, you give us a nonexclusive license to publish it on Medium Services, including anything reasonably related to publishing it (like storing, displaying, reformatting, and distributing it). In consideration for Medium granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Medium may enable advertising on the Services, including in connection with the display of your content or other information. We may also use your content to promote Medium, including its products and content. We will never sell your content to third parties without your explicit permission. You’re responsible for the content you post. This means you assume all risks related to it, including someone else’s reliance on its accuracy, or claims relating to intellectual property or other legal rights. You’re welcome to post content on Medium that you’ve published elsewhere, as long as you have the rights you need to do so. By posting content to Medium, you represent that doing so doesn’t conflict with any other agreement you’ve made. By posting content you didn’t create to Medium, you are representing that you have the right to do so. For example, you are posting a work that’s in the public domain, used under license (including a free license, such as Creative Commons), or a fair use. We can remove any content you post for any reason. You can delete any of your posts, or your account, anytime. Processing the deletion may take a little time, but we’ll do it as quickly as possible. We may keep backup copies of your deleted post or account on our servers for up to 14 days after you delete it. Pertaining to presenting Medium content in an iFrame on another site, this is reasonably close to not allowing that: You may not do, or try to do, the following: ... (2) access or search the Services by any means other than the currently available, published interfaces (e.g., APIs) that we provide;... You can use Embed Code Generator | Embedly to embed an iFrame of a Medium page on another site. But contacting Medium via the email at the bottom of the TOS would tell you for sure if it is OK. Comments on your pieces on Medium do belong to the owner. And You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium. appears to cover the idea of copying your material from Medium to your own site. If in doubt, ask them.