publishing · beehiiv
You’re creating on beehiiv, which means…
You own the newsletter and you can have it taken down. What you can’t point to is the sentence that ends beehiiv’s licence — it wrote that one twice for community posts, and never for yours.
beehiiv gives you a different contract depending on where you are. This page reads all 2; every clause below says which one it comes from.
What they own
Not your posts. The Terms of Use open the section with it: “First and foremost, you own what you create… beehiiv makes no claim to own it.” What beehiiv does claim is “Aggregated Statistics” — the numbers compiled from your publication — and those are “retained solely by beehiiv.”
What you own
The copyright, and a way to make it stop being published. The licence is non-exclusive, so you can publish the same piece anywhere. Section 7 says “You may delete your Content from the Services at your discretion”, and the grant paragraph adds that “you continue to retain the right to have your Content removed from any part of the Services”. Neither beehiiv document contains the word “perpetual” or the word “irrevocable”.
What you don’t
An ending for the licence. beehiiv knows how to write one — “This license terminates” appears twice across these two contracts, both times about community posts, never about your newsletter. Section 17 then keeps “terms regarding ownership or intellectual property rights” alive after you cancel, and the grant sits under a heading that reads “Intellectual Property; Ownership; Feedback”. And if you take beehiiv’s ad money, you don’t hold the profiles it builds of your readers — you hold the job of getting their consent and forwarding their deletion requests.
What they can do with it
Use, reproduce, publish, translate, distribute, syndicate, perform, display and make derivative works of your posts — and of “your name, voice, and/or likeness as contained in your Content”. That licence is sublicensable, so beehiiv can pass those rights on. The community licence is a shorter one running to two parties: beehiiv and the newsletter operator “each” get to “access, use, store, display, reproduce, and distribute” your posts “as reasonably necessary to operate and provide the Community” — no derivative works, no likeness.
The clauses
The grant, and the sentence that is not a termination
beehiiv Terms of Use — Section 6, Your Content ↗
First and foremost, you own what you create. Any original Content you post, upload, share, store, or otherwise provide to beehiiv remains yours and beehiiv makes no claim to own it. … By submitting, providing, or otherwise making available any Content on or through the Services to be published, you expressly grant to beehiiv a limited, royalty-free, sublicensable, non-exclusive, worldwide license and right to use, reproduce, publish, list information regarding, translate, distribute, syndicate, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all such Content and your name, voice, and/or likeness as contained in your Content, in whole or in part, and in any form, media or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed, for use in connection with the Services, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all published Content (and derivative works thereof). Without limiting any of the foregoing, you continue to retain the right to have your Content removed from any part of the Services.
A removal right, not an end
The last sentence lets you have the Content taken down from the Services. It sets no deadline, says nothing about copies already made or about the derivative works the same paragraph allows, and does not say the licence stops.
The sentence they did not write here
beehiiv wrote “This license terminates” twice — once in the Community Terms and once in section 8 of these Terms, both times about Community Content. The drafter had the formula. It is not in this paragraph.
Sublicensable
beehiiv can hand these rights to another company. The sentence does not say who, and does not require them to tell you.
Your voice and likeness
Your name, voice and likeness ride inside the same sentence as your text, not in a separate clause. There is no extra grant to notice, and no extra limit either.
Which way it runs
The licence beehiiv grants you, in section 3, is “limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable”. The licence you grant beehiiv, in section 6, is sublicensable. Same vocabulary, opposite subjects, three sections apart.
The licence beehiiv did write an ending for
beehiiv Community Terms of Use — Section 7, Community Content: Your Content ↗
By posting Community Content, You grant beehiiv and the applicable Publisher each a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, sublicensable license and right to access, use, store, display, reproduce, and distribute Your Community Content as reasonably necessary to operate and provide the Community and the beehiiv platform. This license terminates when Your Community Content is deleted, except to the extent it has been shared with others who have not deleted it.
Two grantees, not one
The Terms of Use licence runs to beehiiv. This one runs to beehiiv and to the newsletter operator whose community you joined — “each,” separately.
A shorter list than your newsletter gets
Six verbs, bounded by purpose: “as reasonably necessary to operate and provide the Community”. The section 6 licence over your newsletter adds derivative works, and your name, voice and likeness. These are not the same rights.
Here is the ending
“This license terminates when Your Community Content is deleted” — and the Terms of Use repeat it for the same posts: “This license terminates with respect to specific Community Content when such content is permanently deleted”. Both sentences are about community posts.
The hole in it
The licence stops when the post is deleted, “except to the extent it has been shared with others who have not deleted it”, and you have no way to make them. Section 13 opens a larger hole than that one.
And then the Community Terms say section 7 survives
beehiiv Community Terms of Use — Section 13, Termination ↗
beehiiv may terminate Your access to any or all Communities for violations of these Community Terms and if You are a customer of beehiiv, any violation of the Terms of Use or other agreement between You and beehiiv. … Upon termination, Your license to use Community terminates and beehiiv may, but is not obligated to, delete Your Community Content. Sections 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 survive termination.
Section 7 is the licence
The list of surviving sections includes 7 — Community Content, the grant above. The sentence that ends the licence on deletion sits inside a section this contract says outlives termination.
Deletion is beehiiv’s option
The licence ends when the content is deleted. After termination, whether it gets deleted is beehiiv’s choice: “may, but is not obligated to”.
Losing access is not deleting
Section 5 lets beehiiv suspend or terminate your access “at any time, with or without notice”. Once you are out, you are not the one deciding whether the posts come down.
No right to post
The Community Terms open by saying so: “Communities are not public spaces and You do not have a right to post Community Content.”
Your subscribers become profiles
beehiiv Terms of Use — Section 6, Additional Obligations & Data Rights ↗
This subsection applies only if you are a beehiiv customer who participates in beehiiv's Ad Network or purchases beehiiv data offerings. … You hereby grant beehiiv the following rights, subject to applicable law:
(i) Profile Creation. Create, maintain, and update profiles ("Subscriber Profiles") for Your Users based on data collected in connection with their interaction with your publications, including without limitation subscription status, content engagement, email open and click events, and other behavioral signals observed within the beehiiv platform;
(ii) Cross-Publication Behavioral Tracking. Observe and record the behavior of Your Users across any of your publications hosted on the beehiiv platform (as well as any publications hosted on the beehiiv platform for other publishers), including content interaction, advertising engagement, and subscription activity, and associate such behavioral data with the applicable Subscriber Profile;
(iii) Data Enrichment. Enrich Subscriber Profiles with data obtained from reputable third-party data providers in accordance with applicable law, including professional demographic information such as industry, job function, employer size, and geographic location … You shall promptly forward to beehiiv at Your Privacy Choices (or such other mechanism beehiiv may reasonably request) any request received from Your Users to access, correct, delete, or restrict the processing of their personal data to the extent such request relates to data processed by beehiiv under this Subsection, and shall cooperate with beehiiv to fulfill any such request in accordance with applicable law.
Who this binds
Only publishers in the Ad Network or buying data offerings. If that is you, it covers every reader on your list.
Across other people’s newsletters
The tracking is not confined to your publication. What your readers do inside other publishers’ beehiiv newsletters is recorded against the same profile.
You supply the consent
The subsection opens by making you warrant you already hold every consent needed to authorise this. The job of having asked your readers is yours, and so is the liability if you did not.
The route out runs through you
There is a deletion route and it is your job: you must forward “any request received from Your Users to access, correct, delete, or restrict the processing of their personal data” and “cooperate with beehiiv to fulfill any such request”. What beehiiv commits to in its own voice is narrower — it “shall cooperate with you to honor any applicable opt-out requests” about interest-based advertising.
The stated limit
beehiiv commits not to disclose Subscriber Profile data to advertisers or data brokers “except in an aggregated and anonymized form”. The targeting happens inside beehiiv.
The numbers about your newsletter belong to beehiiv
beehiiv Terms of Use — Section 3, Aggregated Statistics ↗
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in these Terms, beehiiv may monitor your use of the Services and collect and compile data and information related to your use of the Services that can be used by beehiiv in an aggregate and anonymized manner… As between beehiiv and you, all right, title, and interest in Aggregated Statistics, and all intellectual property rights therein, belong to and are retained solely by beehiiv. You acknowledge that beehiiv may compile Aggregated Statistics based on your Content (as defined below). You agree that beehiiv may: (i) make Aggregated Statistics publicly available in compliance with applicable law
Built from your work, owned by them
The definition of “beehiiv IP” explicitly excludes your Content — and explicitly includes Aggregated Statistics, which are compiled from it.
Publicly available
Statistics derived from your publication can be published by beehiiv, so long as they do not identify you or your readers.
In both contracts
The Community Terms carry the same Aggregated Statistics clause, rewritten to apply to Community Content instead. This is the one thing beehiiv claims outright, and section 17 keeps it after you cancel.
Leaving
beehiiv Terms of Use — Section 17, Termination ↗
When your account is cancelled, whether by you or us, you no longer have any rights to use the beehiiv IP and these Terms will no longer apply, other than: … (iv) terms regarding ownership or intellectual property rights…
After account cancellation, beehiiv is not required to receive, compile, maintain, or make available communications or data of any nature. We will try to provide advance notice to you or provide you access to your account after certain functions have been shut down prior to our cancelling your account so that you are able to retrieve any important information you may have uploaded to your account, but we may not do so if we determine it would be impractical, illegal, not in the interest of someone's safety or security, or otherwise harmful to the rights or property of beehiiv.
What outlives the account
The Terms stop applying when you cancel, with six exceptions. One of them is terms regarding ownership or intellectual property rights, and the content licence sits in the section headed “Intellectual Property; Ownership; Feedback”. Cancelling is not an exit from it.
Nothing is held for you
After cancellation beehiiv has no obligation to keep any of it. The Suspension clause spells out one example of what that includes — “a record of unsubscribe requests”.
Getting it out
Two things are offered and neither is promised: advance notice, or “access to your account after certain functions have been shut down”. The sentence begins “We will try to” and ends with beehiiv’s own list of reasons not to. The word “export” appears in neither beehiiv document.
The 2 agreements
Due Dilly reads the paperwork and reports what it says. This is not legal advice.