Medium's New Terms Of Service Clarified
Following Medium's post on their revised terms on August 17th. An uproar followed over the Terms of Service, particularly this paragraph ;
Unless otherwise agreed in writing, by submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through the Services, you grant Medium a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed on the Services.
You can read the full terms of service here
The medium community had a lot to say about it. A majority disapproved the new terms immediately while a few had a positive disposition towards it. A medium user describes the terms as not worth it and another saying they don't get paid enough for those kind of terms.
What does this really mean
Because of this, Medium has updated their post to properly clarify their new terms and assure the community.
Rights and ownerships
You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through the Services.
Unless otherwise agreed in writing, by submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through the Services, you grant Medium a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed on the Services.
Medium needs this license because you own your content and Medium therefore can’t display it across its various surfaces (i.e., mobile, web) without your permission.
This type of license also is needed to distribute your content across our Services. For example, you post a story on Medium. It is reproduced as versions on both our website and app, and distributed to multiple places within Medium, such as the homepage or reading lists. A modification might be that we show a snippet of your work (and not the full post) in a preview, with attribution to you. A derivative work might be a list of top authors or quotes on Medium that uses portions of your content, again with full attribution. This license applies to our Services only, and does not grant us any permissions outside of our Services.
They further explained :
This license doesn’t give Medium permission to sell your content to a third party, and we’ll never do that.
For those of you that fear that the new terms mean demonetization. Here's a paragraph just for you:
And speaking of our Partner Program, these Terms of Service (just like the previous version of Medium’s Terms of Service) do not alter, modify, or supersede that program. All content you decide to put behind our paywall for monetization still earns you money based on subscribed Medium Member engagement.
In conclusion, the terms of service are mostly the same, nothing has really changed,and as writers, we could reap more benefits in the long run.
