I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file, therefore Mozilla have to establish that if you use them to upload a file that you are granting them the legal right to publish that file. It has to be worldwide because you may be uploading to anywhere in the world.
So why doesn't my backpack come with a mandatory TOS that I won't e.g. put illegal drugs in it and bring it across the border? Why is Firefox any more liable if I used it to publish illegal content on the web than the backpack manufacturer would be if I used it to smuggle illegal content across a border?
Because the legal system around backpacks are better understood. The more common something is the less legal paperwork there is. Judges understand backpacks and have for hundreds of years. Many judges don't understand technology. As a result when selling a backpack you can rely on the court's understanding and thus not have to account for every possibility. Meanwhile because the court might not understand technology you have to account for every possible trivial thing.
Pretty sure this isn’t a legal thing, this is Google going “we got a takedown notice from this company and aren’t about to read it or hear your opinion, in order to protect ourselves legally”
Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.
The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.
My comments above are based on precedence when sites like Facebook added these clauses and people got all panicked thinking the company was going to start selling their content (rather than selling their souls /s). The mundane truth was that they needed the wording to make sure they were legally given the right to publish the content onto the web in the way they did. So people were assuming nefarious reasons when they were just legally protecting themselves.
Now, it does seem strange that Mozilla have suddenly added this when they haven't had it previously. Personally, I deem it highly unlikely that they are planning on monetizing our content in some way; whilst they have made some strange decisions sometimes I don't think they are completely stupid. Mozilla is in a precarious position right now, they are only managing to scape by on user trust and if that disappears they are finished. I'd like to think they are not foolish enough to do something that would catastrophically erode that trust, and selling user data to advertisers would kill them.
Having thought about it a bit more now, I have to wonder if they have dreamt up some other mad scheme, like Mozilla Cloud Storage, or something that would require such wording in the terms. Hopefully, it's just a wording update to protect themselves. I guess we will find out in due course.
I think it's likely they're planning to more deeply integrate some sort of cloud services, perhaps with a paid tier. I don't want that either; stuff like that is fine as an optional extra, but problematic when joined at the hip to a browser.
I mean, Facebook did this so they could run research studies and AI on the data, not so they could publish it. You can give yourself the rights to publish something online for the purpose of running the service and give others the right to view it for personal use without giving yourself a full copyright license to do whatever you want with it.
But the more important question then is: what else will the courts think this language allows? Probably Mozilla could argue they need to store those uploads and analyze them under those conditions.
> If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file.
If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
The "publisher" in this case would be the website the file is uploaded to. If the website doesn't make the file public, then they're not a "publisher".
The browser is merely acting as a tool to do the uploading. Firefox shouldn't be held liable for the contents of the file any more than any other web client. If it did, tools like cURL should be liable in the same way.
Somewhere along the way web browser authors forgot that they're merely building a web user _agent_. It's a tool that acts _on behalf of_ the user, in order to help them access the web in a friendly way. It should in no way be aware of the content the user sends and receives, have a say in matters regarding this content, and let alone share that information with 3rd parties. It's an outrageous invasion of privacy to do otherwise.
>If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
It's hard to tell from your comment who exactly is the target of your complaint. You're not wrong that this interpretation might be silly, but that's not out of the ordinary in carefully using terms of art to insulate from legal liability.
And the issue of peculiar terms of art is leagues different from the issue that everyone else seems to be raising that it represents an intent to abuse private data. Those are two completely different conversations, but you're talking about them here like they're the same thing.
> the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file
If that's all is required to be a publisher then ftp, scp, rsync and hundreds of similar tools are also publishers of the files they transfer. However they don't have Terms of Service like the one Mozilla is giving to Firefox.
That’s interesting, do you know of any cases that were decided on that basis? It seems downright ridiculous but then the legal system is pretty dumb, so…
