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by watersb 772 days ago
Very interesting!

I would like some clarity on the Terms of Service clause 4:

> The content created using Supertone Shift remains your property. However, by using our Services, you grant Supertone a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, and display content solely for the purpose of operating and improving Supertone Shift. This license does not grant Supertone any rights to sell or distribute your content.

Does Supertone Shift need the user content in order to further improve the product during the beta period?

Or does it need the user content in normal operation (for example, running the conversion on remote servers vs local processing)?

I can see some hesitation from people if you're recording everything they say, and keeping that recording for an indefinite period of time.

I can appreciate that there may be a problem enforcing a "Don't use our product for evil" clause, if you can review usage.

The challenge here seems overwhelming.

5 comments

The phrasing is pretty standard, the important part is the middle sentence. Often it includes irrevocable, transferable and sublicensable as well.

That being said, I hate "remains your property" part. It's just fluff that changes nothing, but distracts from the following sentence.

The reason why this is standard is because functionally, anything that receives data from a user, hosts it, and transmits it to third parties is engaging in distribution of copyrighted content. Without a grant of license, pretty much every message board, social media platform, or any website or internet-based application that does anything with user-generated data could be exposed to copyright liability. You may note that this very site's legal declarations page includes an identical clause.

"Remains your property" is not fluff at all, and explicitly disclaims any ownership of rights associated with content you post, and equivalently indemnifies users against any liability for re-posting or re-using content they posted here, which they'd potentially be exposed to if they were assigning copyright to the hosting platform rather than just granting a license.

Stating you own it, and then licensing it away in the sentence after to give yourself irrevocable rights seems duplicitous.

Neat looking service though.

No, it's definitely not duplicitous, and is standard practice across the industry.

It boils down to "we're not claiming to own the rights to your content -- you still retain those -- but we need a grant of permission from you to ensure that we can publish it on our own site without facing possible liability".

Or.. it's industry standard duplicity.

This isn't specifically an issue with this service alone (I like it), but the approach to UGC (user generated content) in general.

What's unclear is what rights or license remain if someone deletes their account and content. It's trivial to clarify, making omission is a decision.

Use of the word "improving" is pretty general and broad, and can be about the priorities of the vendor over the customer.

What's missing is the clause that closes the loop and doesn't give them a lifetime license.

"you grant Supertone a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, and display content solely for the purpose of operating and improving Supertone Shift."

Its open-ended, yes, but that does not imply any duplicity. Platform providers have an incentive to minimize their liability exposure, so they're not going to volunteer to add language that applies additional qualifications and exceptions, but that does not in itself imply that any deception or abuse is going on.

It's certainly proper to call out examples of actual bad behavior by specific organizations, but not so much to treat defensive boilerplate as though it is itself bad behavior.

"Remains your property" is not fluff at all, and explicitly disclaims any ownership of rights associated with content you post,

I think that should not be necessary to do explicitly because it is the default state. At any rate it is weird to talk about IP assignment in the very same paragraph as licensing.

that is totally dependent on the jurisdictions involved, and modified by the agreement that the user accepts to start the service(s) no?
It's part of the agreement that the user accepts to use the service, and there are frameworks in place that already implement cross-jurisdictional reciprocity for things like copyright licenses.
Looks like facebook's ToS,

we may need your data for some unspecified purpose ("AI model training") that we can't even dream of right now, so we'll just take all the rights

There are dozens of other products in this category, including completely open source ones you can fine tune.

Commercial applications like Voice.Ai and Koe are real time and have celebrity and anime voices respectively.

The RVC ecosystem on GitHub has dozens of different real time open source voice changers. I haven't kept up with the SOTA, but they're incredible, fine tunable, and 100% local.

https://voice.ai

https://koe.ai

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zkaBK5erB2c

Ive tried making this exact product using all of these services, including using github repo koi is based on.

They all use like 50% of my cpu to get real time. I was able to get actual low latency with koi, but still massive cpu usage. And theres no community of models for it either.

Perhaps someone who really knows what theyre doing could optimize these open source models but its not me

> Ive tried making this exact product using all of these services, including using github repo koi is based on.

Could you share the repo?

You can find kois model if you search koi llvc.

I just made some modifications to run it as a stream from a microphone. I am trying to develop my own voice changer (https://voicechange.io) so I dont want to share the source code for that.

I'm assuming it's this one which was posted from their Twitter: https://github.com/KoeAI/llvc
You don't need to look far to understand those terms are standard, and by 'standard' see non-binding, or broad, it doesnt matter what they 'say' here because you will only find supertone abusing these 'terms' if someone at supertone lets you know - meanwhile your voice is syphoned off and used in anyway their friends see fit, and no terms laid out here will be broken. As per other replies for standard software terms, see duplicitous.
It could atleast have a time limit