Terms of Service are a reality we deal with all the time with digital goods and services. And by “deal with”, I mostly mean we don’t read them and simply agree to whatever they say instead, assuming there is nothing crazy in them. But that also causes a lot of problems, with customers of these products suddenly having changes to them foisted upon them, or realizing that they can’t do with their purchase what they thought they could, all of which are covered by the ToS that was essentially unread.
As a result, there are some folks out there who like to dive into the ToS for targeted industries. YouTuber Miss Krystle’s channel, Top Music Attorney, is one example of this. She is an attorney and musical artist who dives into Terms of Service within the music industry, analyzing them and pulling out anything that would be of interest or concern to a customer of the product or service. For instance, she covered the ToS for Splice, which provides a catalogue of royalty-free music samples for musicians to use.
“I have a series where I go through the terms of service for these music businesses, and I tell you guys what these contracts say that you’re being forced to sign in order to use these platforms,” she explains.
Krystle claims she was handed a cease and desist order from Splice’s legal department, to which she suggested jumping on a phone call to clarify some of the stipulations of the company’s ToS, saying she wanted to create a followup video for her audience’s clarity.
She says the call was productive and that Splice had agreed to update its ToS to iron out flagged inconsistencies, and that she left feeling a positive resolution was had by all.
So far, this whole thing reads as annoying but not terribly surprising. Splice’s legal team likely came across Miss Krystle’s video and, because ToS are somehow afforded copyright protection, sent out a C&D claiming the reproduction of those ToS in her YouTube video was infringing. Again, Miss Krystle is an attorney, so I imagine the call she had with Splice included explaining how this use is likely to be covered under fair use provisions. After all, it’s not as though she were using Splice’s ToS to copy it for her own ToS, which is where copyright claims for Terms of Service tend to come from. In any case, she indicates the call ended on a positive note.
And then Splice issued a copyright strike against her channel.
It was only the next day that she discovered her Top Music Attorney YouTube channel had been issued a copyright infringement takedown notice at the request of Splice, resulting in a harmful copyright strike. If a YouTube user receives three copyright strikes in 90 days, their account and channel is permanently terminated.
And now Splice has a problem. For starters, the original video Splice complained about is still up on her channel. And because of both the C&D and moreso because of the copyright strike, a whole lot more attention is being paid to that original video, Miss Krystle’s follow up video in which she tells the story of the C&D and getting the copyright strike, and the issues surrounding Splice’s ToS as a whole. You have to assume that Splice took these actions because it wanted to limit the content of these videos’ critiques of its ToS from as much public attention as it could. In true Streisand Effect fashion, it achieved the exact opposite.
Which brings me to the question that everyone should be asking: just what is in these Terms of Service that Splice is so terrified its customers and potential customers will see?
Fortunately, a lot more people can get the answer to that question from Miss Krystle, all because Splice wanted to try to silence a critic to keep them hidden.
