Summary

Happyscribe is a popular transcription and subtitle tool. They offer AI and human transcription, and they’re known for supporting many languages and exporting captions for video creators.
But there’s a major issue hiding in their Terms of Service: Happyscribe takes extremely broad rights over your files including the right to use your audio, video and transcripts to train their AI models in perpetuity.
They offer an opt-out. But the default is that your content is used to improve their AI systems and can be sublicensed, copied, modified and used in ways most people do not expect from a transcription tool.
At Good Tape, we take the opposite approach. We never train on your data, never take perpetual rights, never reuse your files for anything, and never ask for licenses we don’t genuinely need to provide transcription.
If privacy matters to you, we don’t recommend Happyscribe.

Happyscribe has unhappy terms

Happyscribe has built a strong reputation among creators, podcasters, universities and media companies. They’ve been around for years and support dozens of languages. I genuinely respect many of the products in our space, and normally I’d rather highlight what competitors do well rather than call them out on what they don’t.

But sometimes you read a terms document where the permissions go way beyond what feels reasonable. And sometimes, staying quiet feels wrong.

This is one of those moments.

The moment we read the clauses covering Your Content in their terms, it became clear that the problem isn’t the product. It’s the philosophy behind the product.

This isn’t about competition. We’re happy to recommend other services like Klang or Turboscribe. It’s about trust, and protecting users from predatory terms.

Why you should think twice about Happyscribe

They take a perpetual license to your files

Happy Scribe’s Terms say that by uploading your content: audio, video, transcripts, captions, everything… You automatically grant them a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual license.

Perpetual means forever.

That license lets them:

copy your files
host them
reproduce them
modify them
create derivative works
distribute them
publicly display them
sublicense them
use them to build new products

…and they can do all of this in perpetuity. This is far beyond what’s necessary to generate a transcript. And it’s far beyond what most users expect when they upload a confidential interview or sensitive meeting.

They train their AI on your content by default

Hidden inside the same clause is this line:

the right “to improve Happy Scribe and its affiliates’ products and services, including training and maintaining speech-to-text models.”

In other words:

your files become AI training data the moment you upload them. Unless you manually find and activate the opt-out setting. Good luck finding that button hidden in their settings.

The fact is that default is training on your data. The default is using your content to improve their AI models. The default is giving them rights that last forever. That’s a huge problem for journalists, researchers, lawyers, therapists, creators and companies handling private material.

At Good Tape, we don’t train on your data at all. Not even to “improve the service”. We don’t believe your files should ever become someone else’s dataset.

The opt-out still leaves the broad license in place

Even if you opt out of AI training, the rest of the license remains completely unchanged. Happy Scribe still keeps:

the perpetual license
the sublicensing rights
the right to modify and create derivative works
the right to distribute your content
extremely broad permissions over your personal data

Opting out only removes the “training AI” part, nothing else. Most people assume “opt-out” means “don’t use my data”. But that’s not what’s happening here.

You retain ownership but they retain control

To their credit, Happy Scribe is very explicit that you keep ownership of your content. But ownership without control doesn’t mean much.

You can own your car, but if someone else has a perpetual license allowing them to drive it, repaint it, rent it out, modify it, or use it for their own business, the ownership becomes symbolic.

We believe transcription companies should ask for the smallest possible rights not the largest possible ones.

We believe in a different way of doing things

Good Tape was built on a simple belief:

if someone trusts us with their voice, their work or their story, we should respect that trust completely.

That means:

We don’t train on your data
We don’t reuse your recordings
We don’t take perpetual rights
We don’t build AI models on top of your private conversations
We don’t hide important information in long legal paragraphs
We don’t make you choose between convenience and privacy

We want you to feel safe the moment you hit “upload”. Not confused. Not worried. Not tricked into giving away more than you intended. Happy Scribe has chosen a different philosophy. They’re allowed to. But it’s not a philosophy we can support. You deserve better.

There are companies like Good Tape, Klang or Turboscribe that offer more privacy-friendly approaches. And Good Tape exists for people who want a transcription tool they can trust. A tool that transcribes your work without turning it into training data.

Your recordings should stay yours. Always.

Alex Sabour

About the author

Alex has more than 15 years of experience in creative strategy and brand storytelling. Before joining Good Tape as Head of Marketing, he worked as a creative director for global brands, led creative teams, and earned more than 80 industry awards with GORILLA agency.