Thread by @questauthority

OK - quick contract interpretation thread. And a serious question for the lawyers. Check me on this, please - I'm reading a social media site's terms and conditions, and it looks to me like they may have accidentally made their equivalent of retweets a violation of their TOS.

OK - so here we have the user granting a sublicensable license to the site. And the site, in turn, granting a sublicense to its other users. But the sublicense only allows use "subject to these Terms and Conditions."

And down here we have an IP provision - in "these Terms and Conditions" that expressly says users cannot "modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit, or distribute, in any manner, any material on or from" the site - "for any purpose whatsoever."

And I can't find anything else anywhere in the terms that would allow use of content from the site.

So, AFAICT, they license users to reuse content "subject to these Terms and Conditions" but the Terms and Conditions then explicitly ban reuse.

help.spoutible.com/support/soluti…

Now my gut is honestly screaming that I'm missing something here. But I went through it on stream, and the handful of other lawyers there couldn't spot anything I'd missed either.

But I feel like there's got to be something.

And, I mean, even if I'm right it's pretty clearly an unintended effect, and the site isn't likely to enforce the TOS violation. But it still seems really strange.