I’ve seen a post here about Reddit restoring user content without permission and discussing whether this is legal or not, and decided to create this post to help others find resources regarding this before taking any legal action.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and nothing posted here (at least by me) should be considered legal advice under any circumstance. This post serves only to help people find useful links and resources that might be helpful when taking legal actions.
Reddit’s Official Documents
User Agreement (ToS)
Under section 5 (Your Content)
By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.
Under section 18 (Miscellaneous)
Our failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not operate as a waiver of such right or provision
Source: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
Privacy Policy
Under section 5 (Your Rights and Choices):
When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
Support Pages
No, if you delete a post or comment, it’s removed from Reddit and moderators and Reddit administrators won’t be able to bring it back for you. So before you delete something, be absolutely sure.
Well, their ToS says these (ToS + Privacy Policy) are a legally-binding agreement. So technically, you could sue them for not deleting your posts
Often, the more specific clause trumps the more general one. My interpretation of these terms would be that (1) they have a right to copy and redistribute your content, but (2) you have a right to delete your content. If they want to copy and redistribute your deleted content, they should do that instead of putting it right back where it originally was as if you’d never deleted it. AKA I think they could post threads made by mods/admins that contain all the deleted content, where it’s coming from them (i.e. the posts and comments are made by a Reddit account). Per their license agreement, they would not be required to give attribution/moral rights to the original creators (this just means they don’t have to cite their source, basically). Putting it back under the user’s original account (whether that account is deleted or not) would make the line stating, “Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content,” superfluous.
But what are people going to do, fund a class action against Reddit for restoring deleted content? Maybe talk to some attorneys practicing in that area, contact the EFF (they have attorneys), or crowdfund something. I don’t have any deleted/restored stuff, but if there’s an attorney willing to take the case, I’d still throw in to a crowdfunded effort (if necessary, I don’t know off the top of my head any of the rules about getting attorneys’ fees in class actions, and I’m not sure if this would qualify as a copyright case since it seems that the issue is more of a contract law thing).