PayPal joins the Dark Side (opens in new tab)

As usual for this kind of complaint, this is a person who does not understand copyright very well: without being granted a universal license to reproduce, store, and modify modified your content, websites on the Internet would not be allowed to resize, truncate, or cache your content, and quite clearly would have right to show it to absolutely anyone else. Therefore, essentially every website not only will but must have a clause that reads similarly to this one. In the case of PayPal, while this user waxes on about not even providing content to PayPal, 1) if that is true then this clause has no effect (so he should stop whining about it), and 2) that isn't true for everyone else: I believe PayPal caches the brand images one posts for hosted buttons (and if not they probably should), payments themselves can have descriptions that might themselves be trademarks or even long enough to be copyrighted... what I imagine happened is that PayPal had previously made essentially the same argument that "we don't host content" and so never added this boilerplate, and someone just recently realized that there really is at least small amounts of content involved, so they added the required language.

> So the only content there is, is the online stuff people and companies sell using PayPal as payment provider.

This deduction makes no sense because PayPal isn't publishing those things. Their checkout-with-PayPal service is not much more than a link on a website, in most cases.

But even if PayPal were trying to use that service to copyright the material on the originating website, it wouldn't fly in court.

If PayPal's legal boilerplate really bothers you, you'll have trouble browsing top few thousand websites at all (most popular sites have broad and vague agreements like this).

On a related note, PayPal is pretty easy to avoid these days, if one is so inclined. The behavior of Facebook and Google are much more worrisome, as they're totally impossible to avoid.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9439691

I think in fairness PayPal were already very much on the Dark Side; now they've just gone bat shit mental.