valveman

I've seen a post here about Reddit restoring user content without permission and discussing whether this is legal or not, and decided to create this post to help others find resources regarding this before taking any legal action.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and nothing posted here (at least by me) should be considered legal advice under any circumstance. This post serves only to help people find useful links and resources that might be helpful when taking legal actions.

Reddit's Official Documents

User Agreement (ToS)

Under section 5 (Your Content)

By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.

Under section 18 (Miscellaneous)

Our failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not operate as a waiver of such right or provision

Source: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement

Privacy Policy

Under section 5 (Your Rights and Choices):

When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy

Support Pages

No, if you delete a post or comment, it’s removed from Reddit and moderators and Reddit administrators won’t be able to bring it back for you. So before you delete something, be absolutely sure.

Source: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043483451-If-I-delete-a-post-or-comment-can-it-be-restored

I've seen that some subreddits went dark and said they'd come back in 2 days (June 14th), and others said they'd go dark indefinitely, until the API changes are rolled back. I'd like to make an appeal for the admins who're willing to go back: please don't.

I think Reddit wouldn't withstand 2 weeks to a month without their largest subreddits, and maybe they'd change their minds about API changes. Some may say they'd just make the subreddits public again and promote someone to mod (which I totally agree, they'll probably do that if the blackout endures for too much time), but I think most people don't realise the PITA it is to be a good mod, and just want to be one because of the status (I'm not an ex-mod btw, I just heard it is very complicated to moderate and I believe it really is).

Secondly, there's no guarantee that Reddit won't pull the rug again. Even if they roll back the changes and everyone goes back, they'll probably come up with this strategy again some time in the future. So instead of going back, stay in the Fediverse: all applications are open source AFAIK; you can run your own instance if you wish; you can defederate other instances if you wish; you can contribute with new features you miss or create a fork aplication of your own if you want to; heck, you could create your own Fediverse application if you want. And there won't be a scumbag to come and try stop you.