“Free” as in “we own your IP” (opens in new tab)

The term you're looking for is "contracts of adhesion," and yes, courts do acknowledge the potential for unfair treatment there. (That isn't to say that they'd strike this particular clause — just that they do recognize and account for the power inequality inherent in this kind of contract.)

He has a problem with the transfer of IP. He quotes a ToS clause from another company with grants a perpetual free license to your idea, which he has no problem with.

With the "transfer-style" clause you could submit an idea, an then be sued if you use your own idea yourself. That indeed seems strange.

As written, if you suggest something, it seems to me that they'd own the idea - and you wouldn't be able to use them yourself.

'... all right, title and interest in and to ... including all associated IP Rights...'

While it may be intended to protect them, that's hardly justification for such a sweeping transfer. Less total licensing could have been worked out.

Indeed - there's an example of such in the article:

'... shall have a royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, and perpetual license to use or incorporate into the Service any suggestions, ideas, enhancement requests, feedback, or other information...'

You can easily solve that problem by claiming some sort of non-exclusive licence without claiming the underlying IP. Web sites built around user-generated content do this all the time, for example.

Attempting to grab the IP itself is either careless drafting or a hostile act. Either way it looks bad for the company doing it.

With line anchor: https://github.com/DataDog/dd-agent/blob/master/packaging/da....

You can freely copy pretty much anyone's as legal documents are not covered by copyright.

However, the problem there is that doing so may result you not having the protection you believe that the documents offer you. The false sense of security is now worse than just not having documents as you probably won't do anything to fix it and won't be aware of the risk.

We've put our legal docs online: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal

Copy them if you want.

They are for discussion forums, a community CMS service. Broadly they consider a site admin to be the owner of a database/collective work and has database rights, that an individual owns their content but grants a right to the site admin to include that content in the database/collective work into the future. They allow the end user to request deletion of their profile (but acknowledges the data that forms part of the collaborative work will remain). And they dissolve the platform of any liability arising from the content. They place some obligations on the site admin to reactively moderate and handle reported/flagged content within some reasonable (24-48 hours) amount of time, and includes a policy of automatic escalation and content removal (from public view) for flagged content that isn't handled by a site admin. It allows for monetisation via charging for services or referral fees.

It's an interesting situation. It could be assumed that everyone sees that, and then perhaps not require proof that the person saw that statement. However if you apply that same logic it could easily be assumed people aren't actually reading the Terms, and so how could that be allowed to be binding? It is technically possible to have a time-check to see how long someone has spent on a Terms of Service page (if any at all), so there couldn't be the excuse that it is impossible otherwise. I suppose it would come down to a judge deciding who should be allotted more protection, and hopefully for the benefit of society. I imagine there must already be case law that says one way or another.

is it binding if i write a script using curl? or, even better, hitting enter on the default button?

The _transfer_ of IP Rights? From what I've seen it isn't everywhere - I've checked many performance monitoring agreements, and agreements of other software. Many performance monitoring companies require you give them a license to your ideas. But a few go further than that - and want to transfer the IP rights as well. Why go that extra step? Very successful monitoring companies haven't needed this.

Ultimately, our lawyers said "no" to this clause.