Vultr is now claiming full perpetual commercial rights over all hosted content
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
A Note About Vultr's Terms of Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865941
- On their homepage, they list "Cloud Compute - starting at $2.50/month". However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying.
- So I created an account. The first thing that pops up is "enter a payment method". What was that about being a "free account"?
- You can click away from that and go to "Deploy New Instance". Choosing the cheapest options and disabling all the automatically selected extras, the lowest possible price seems to be twice that advertised "starting at" price.
Ok, I looked around. Now I would like to delete that account I had to create. No such option. Asking Google, apparently you can only delete an account by submitting a support ticket.
My first impressions are not particularly positive...
Are these not details?
https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
I found this by spelunking deeply into... the main menu where there's a Pricing option. I'm not a Vultr customer and I don't have an account with them.
I was curious and I made an account. And the "enter credit card" thing you complain about is just part of the onboarding flow, along with things like "set up your profile". Is it so crazy that you might want a fast track to put your card in for a hosting service? It's all optional anyway.
Ignoring that (I didn't enter a credit card), there's a prominent Deploy button you can hit.
The issue you see about pricing is that they only offer that cheap price in some data centers. Atlanta has it, but the current default selection of Miami does not. They could definitely do better to make this obvious since they are advertising that minimum, but this is not at all surprising to me who has used tons of cloud provisioning UIs. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same pricing in all regions, no one actually does that.
Once Atlanta is selected, they also auto select a better compute class by default ("AMD High Performance"). Setting that to "Regular Cloud Compute" gets you down to that $2.50/mo price.
Except for one more thing, they default select Backups for it, and that's another $1/mo.
They could do better about this stuff but it's barely something to get upset about. Before you spin up the server, the final price is listed right there in both hourly and monthly units, which is better than AWS does.
doesn't inspire much confidence.
The two factor is a check that you actually control the email you purport to own, it's a perfectly fine thing to do. Are you arguing against two factor by default? Are you arguing that a service shouldn't validate email addresses? Seems especially important for a service that can be used for hacking or DDOS attacks, no?
They have a one year free-tier you can sign-up for during your trial. I am on that plan now. Still I always forget to search different regions when attempting to launch a free VM, so there is some delay until I remember to choose Atlanta.
But, realistically, they should simply change the onboarding process in order to avoid that issue transparently. Allow free signup and access but require a payment method to spin up a server, for example. Or showing all the features+benefits+pricing without signup.
Type: Cloud Computer - Shared CPU
Location: New York
OS: Debian
Plan: Regular Cloud Compute
Auto backup: Disable
No doubt, they will make it even harder to find in the future - behind some new feature toggle.
- Dark patterns are bullshit but are hardly unique to them.
- They probably require a credit card to cut down on scams.
- Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.
They probably lost a sizable percentage of those who read these comments as well.
> Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.
Do you have an interest in this company or something? Oddly passive aggressive comment.
It is proof of that though. Becouse employing dark patterns is being overtly malicious for us who "see through" dark patterns.
Dark patterns mostly work due to the victim not understanding them, so it makes sense to point them out.
Here's a moderator comment on the original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...
Those Terms and Conditions could have been clearer, but no one has betrayed anybody, no one is stealing your hosted content and nobody would have said anything if its was not for a redditor with far too much time in their hands trying to interpret legalese, badly.
Disclaimer: I have never used Vultr, I do not care what happens to them because of this, but everybody would benefit from taking every drama-du-jour with a pinch of salt, especially when it comes from a new reddit account.
> "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell said.
Making a mistake by stuffing their terms of use with vague boilerplate legalese which could apply to anything is one thing, not taking responsibility for that mistake and clearly stating "we made a mistake" instead just means they ended up rubbing in the stain. People are forgiving of mistakes; hubris, not so much.
As others have pointed out: that line of text was not harmless, and whether you have a law degree or not is not the issue there. It was not malicious in intent, but it was wrong and overreaching nonetheless.
We do not know if it was malicious in intent or not.
It is entirely possible that they felt that they could allow all of their private servers to be crawled by whoever was willing to pay - perhaps with terms to make it palatable (only be used for LLM weights, no human will see it, content may not be regurgitated wholesale, etc).
It could be that this change in the ToS was made to cover their backs. In fact - they may actually have already crawled all of the servers.
They claim this was not their intent. But when it comes to abusing PII that is hovered up by providers, I have been burned too often to assume a mistake.
Caveat Emptor
The response of 'why would they ever assume bad intention by a startup tech company which pivoted recently to focus on AI offerings' crocodile tears just makes it worse.
At this point, barring the existence of an impeccable and long-running reputation, if you assume that any place you store your data is not going to screw you the moment they can to make a buck, then you are hopelessly naive.
That is why other counterpart would also hire a lawyer.
If you want to hire a full-time personal counsel, go for it.
The rest of us insist on something else. Understandable agreements is something that should be forced on all companies unless we can perhaps win the fight against TOS being legally enforceable in the first place. That would be the best world.
Companies like they do not want to pay for "good engineering" don't want to pay for "understandable contracts".
The legal industry is self-creating this issue because that makes their services more necessary.
I guess that is similar to software industry creating insane complexity to make their job more necessary.
However the company itself doesn't want to allocate resources regardless of the actual cost.
Because regardless at your $/hr, a contract that protects the company in the same way and is understandable by the user takes MORE HOURS, than one that just protects the company and fuck the user.
Lots of these lawyers at companies with internal council could do this are a resource that is over utilized already. There's no room for more hours.
>Those Terms and Conditions could have been clearer
Sounds like the issue was exactly because the ToS wasn't clear which is not the fault of a redditor.
It was a fiasco of their own making.
Yes, you'll need to update your ToS more often if you just say what you want to do instead of "bulletproofing" something forever by making it so abstract it applies to anything in perpetuity - but if you want that, the price you pay is that people will sometimes call you out on it, misinterpretation or not.
Where I live you cannot enter a contract that you cannot be expected to have understood. In fact TOS that are not written in clear understandable language are generally considered to be invalid by courts.
If that many people are misunderstanding the TOS, that's a bad sign.
I mean, I've heard of them now, and hadn't before, and had assumed by the name it was some dumb Buzzfeed-like site. Possibly they'll get some extra business out of it.
https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/
Section 12:
You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense
through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit
and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known
or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or
compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you.
> As between you and us, you own your User Content and you have full responsibility for all User Content you make or submit, including its legality, reliability and appropriateness, while using the Services.
This seems the key part
I don’t know if vultr language is worse than others, but my concern would be that someone selling you out can squeeze a lot in that clause for a long time, particularly if you never find out. Arguably that’s in bad faith, but…
Say that to provide the Services to you, vultr has to supplement its income by (old school) selling your videos to a dvd publishing company, or (newer) creating their own streaming tv channel, or providing them to an AI model training company, or providing them to an “affiliate” advertising-serving broker who slurps your created content and slaps one or more segmentation labels about your content (“kink”, “religion(X)”, “gamer”) tied to your email which it then resells to world+dog?
Ie is selling you out part of what vultr needs to do to provides the Services to you?
I find it very hard to trust companies based solely on their legal language when that language is viewed from an adversarial position. But I am not lawyer to know what kinds of “misreadings” are “beyond the pale”/not legally defensible.
First time I hear such requirement
True but most times, when you are the product, the service is free. In this case you pay for the service.
Vultr is just even cheekier than LinkedIn.
Who's to say if they'll actually act on this, but them setting themselves up to legally do this is all a bit gross.
"Vultr [will own] [all of your] User Content [and do whatever Vultr wants with] the User Content [...] for the purposes of providing the Services to you."
You could read that as: "if you want to work with us we will own all of your user content".
Either way you read it, it seems like poor wording.
If you ask if you can stay up late for the rest of your life, it should follow that you gain that right for the rest of your life.
If you ask for both at the same time, in the same sentence, you might grow up to write TOS for vultr.
Imagine the copyright infringement case Getty Images v. Vultr:
“Your honor, Joe Shmo LLC gave us an eternal right to do anything we want with this image that is watermarked ‘Getty Images’, so Getty can’t sue us.”
Maybe we need a provision in context law that directly penalizes anyone who writes a ludicrous provision into a contract.
> without compensation
Truly exquisite contract drafting, gentlemen.
> In order to simplify and further clarify our ToS, we are removing the following sentence from Section 12.1(a) of our ToS
https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Serv...
> (a) You are responsible for the information, text, opinions, messages, comments, audio visual works, motion pictures, photographs, animation, videos, graphics, sounds, music, software, Apps, and any other content or material that You or your end users submit, upload, post, host, store, or otherwise make available (“Make Available”) on or through the Services (collectively, “Your Content,” “Content” or “User Content”)
What is the "Services" then? It's explained here (first paragraph[1]):
> The Terms explain how you are permitted to use the services provided by and through our platform and website(s) (main url located at www.vultr.com) as well as all of our associated internet and online properties [...] Collectively, the Site, the Materials, and the services provided therein are referred to as the “Services”.
Is a website I host in Vultr an "associated online property"? When I upload or modify some of my website content through vultr.com, does it become User Content? This is very over-reaching on purpose (as most legalese tends to be) but not in a good way, I wouldn't want to have to go to court to prove that their non-binding blog post is correct and the binding legal terms are incorrect, neither should I nor anyone.
No, I don't think a reasonable person would read what you've quoted and come away with that interpretation. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist about what reasonable person means.
> our associated internet and online properties
Imagine your car dealer pushed over a 100pg finance contract with a first paragraph that said “we will take all your property if you miss a payment” but the dealer assured you that “we don’t really do that, it’s just lawyer stuff.” then said “you don’t need to read the rest, just sign here”.
How much of a great person would they have to be, and how much of an optimist would you have to be to sign it without reading the rest?
> The Terms explain how you are permitted to use the services provided by and through our platform and....
Platform = hosting.
There's no small text, there's no restrictions, there's no qualification. It said nothing about "public mediums" or "for purposes of rendering the needed services".
I actually think there is an attempt in the ToS as written to keep the definition narrow in the way that the parent comment quotes, but it is unfortunately not super well drafted, because there is a partially-explicit distinction between "platform" and "services" that may make sense to a legal person, but is not sufficiently clear for a technical person.
So not quite good enough, IMO, but a distinction is being made in the relevant section, and this can be seen if you read the paragraphs in question.
1. the definition of "User Content" includes "your end users", something you can only have when using their cloud platform services, not when you're using their community forum.
2. It refers to "Services", not "website services"
> (a) If You use Our Services for any site, sub-domain, page or business model that allows Your end users or customers to control or upload material to Internet space assigned to You by Us, You shall be deemed to be acting as a "Service Provider" with respect to such services and/or customers. Service Providers include but are not limited to customers which; (i) resell bandwidth as hosts to third parties; (ii) operate user-generated content sites such as forums, "tube" sites, review sites, and online classified advertising sites; [...]
3. This paragraph refers to their hosting/platform services as just "Services", again.
I don't see a clear distinction being made.
[1]: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Cloud host Vultr rips user data ownership clause from ToS after web outrage https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/vultr_content_controv... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857680)
Primrose Schools, Rita's Ice, Small's Sliders, Transom Capital, and quite a few other small companies use exactly those words. The first three are franchisors, and the last one is a private equity company. None are in the social media business, for which that clause is clearly intended.
Do all those companies use the same low-budget legal drafting service?
Yes. Boilerplate rules the legal world as far as I can see. As well as always sneaking in things in the hopes that people will fail to notice and not notice.
This is not laziness on the lawyers' part, it is them doing what is correct, given the priorities they have been given.
Regarding ToS and similar things, he told us that especially for startups, they were heavily "inspired" by other startups and other companies and made minor adjustments, so yeah, I don't find it hard to believe it's all a game of copy pasting
https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Serv...
Huge opportunity for a service using AI that does, then reports on a public site businesses using shady language or hiding traps, possibly assigning a score.
Also how is perpetual irrevocable links to commercialize your content in any way they want is required for providing the service?
You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, *perpetual*, *irrevocable*, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, *prepare derivative works*, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and *otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate*, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, *for purposes of providing the Services to you*._> for purposes of providing the Services to you
It's not about being too stupid. Legalese is very specific, not lay language, and you always should refer to your legal counsel for interpretation.
An example that always comes to mind is "hostile workplace". It has a very, very specific legal definition that is different from a lay understanding of such. It's not hard for pitchforks to be raised when the rabble misinterprets a legal term.
Let's be clear. I'm not saying Vultr has done nothing wrong or hasn't overreached here. I'm only responding to your comment in general terms.
They're running a business, and in business these kinds of asinine decisions hurt the bottom line.
Fuck them. Move to a different VPS host. I won't be doing business with them ever again, nor do I have the time to re-read their ToS at some point in the future.
but a *VPS host*? that's absurd. it's like someone there asked ChatGPT for a new TOS without telling it what the TOS would be for.
Then it'll be some 'to gain access to your site you must agree....' crap.
I'm really hating what the Internet has turned into.
> You are responsible for the information, text, opinions, messages, comments, audio visual works, motion pictures, photographs, animation, videos, graphics, sounds, music, software, Apps, and any other content or material that
That's the prefix to your first paragraph, meaning you as the user is responsible for that, not that Vultr is responsible for that.
Your second paragraph is explicitly about "for purposes of providing the Services to you" which it'd be really hard to argue that "using your user's uploaded photo for Vultr's marketing promotion" is for the purpose of providing a service to you, so I don't think you have to be afraid of that.
I'm sure Vultr's terms and conditions contain horrible shit, just like any other terms and conditions. But I don't think those two paragraphs highlight anything more nefarious than usual.
"Why did you sell my data to an AI company?" "We deemed it appropriate."
There is also the sublicensing clause, which means they can sell it to anyone, and "process, adapt, [...] modify, prepare derivative works", which has nothing to do with hosting, but allows them to change your data and reuse it for any purpose they "deem appropriate".
No, I didn't, but you again missed the full context. Neither of those terms can be considered in isolation, so again:
> You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive [...] in any way that Vultr deems appropriate [...] for purposes of providing the Services to you
So unless it's for the purpose of providing you the service, it doesn't matter what Vultr "deems" appropriate.
Feel free to check this with a lawyer if you feel unsure.
"Deemed" in particular doesn't require any sort of reasoning or argument for the company to make any decision it likes. And "appropriate" is not a synonym for "necessary".
"Why did you sell my data?" "We deemed it appropriate for the purposes of providing the Services to you."
What's your legal refutation to this under US law?
(In the EU, this whole clause would possibly be unenforceable from the start, but I know a lot less about EU law.)
That said, due to the type of service they provide, vultr customers like myself don’t necessarily even have the right to grant them the rights that they claim here. If I run a SaaS and people are uploading photos for work (eg photos of property damage for the purposes of identifying and repairing it), those photos are not my property and must not become public. The idea that this could ever be OK is batshit insane.
So I hope/suspect this policy is going to be reverted pretty quickly, since it seems quite incompatible with their core business.
No way can I risk my customers data being “publicly displayed”!
"Just"? A blog post written this week for terms that have been there since 2021?
Even if Services included the actual hosting service (it doesn't in this case, see tons of other commenters quoting the definition for Services in this agreement), it still wouldn't give them a license to use your stuff beyond what's necessary to provide hosting to you.
And what if they, say, introduce a new generative machine learning feature into the Service which necessitates training on customer content?
If this was truly just about giving themselves the right to do what's technically necessary to provide the service, then 1) doesn't that mean that they were operating illegally before? and 2) they would've just given themselves the rights to do the specific things they need, not literally anything they could want as long as it can be argued to be "necessary to provide the service"
That's not how contract interpretation works.
Secondly, if we go hypothetical and redefine Services to mean the actual hosting service, if they do that stuff, they get sued. And I think there'd be a good case that the uses you outline would fall outside of that what's needed to provide that service.
You are free to take the pessimistic interpretation, I just don't think it's a reasonable interpretation, especially since even a single legal battle in this area would probably ruin this company.
That said I do think the intention of the section was just to allow them do what you're paying them for, but the lawyers just got a little too zealous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39862040
And if there's lack of clarity on this point, while their intent was not to make the claim, they've failed.
> Edit: As an EU customer, and having called my lawyer really quickly, we don't even think that this is legal / would hold up in court in the EU. Also they'd have been required to summarise the TOS changes as by our local law.
While companies can write whatever they want in their TOS, I would wary using the rights I just gave to myself. It can be devastating.
The problem is that if Vultr really thinks it can exercise these rights, then there is a risk that proprietary information stored on their servers will be made public -- despite what EU or any other laws might say.
It doesn't really matter if you can take them to court if Vultr causes a data leak that results in the loss all your customers. And most of us don't have the resources to be able to do that anyway.
All of that said. I've found Vultr really good to work with and I am crossing my fingers, though not assuming, that this is a mistake.
I've raised a ticket with them, and I'll give them a couple of weeks before I make plans to pull out. Fortunately I'm still in stealth mode and have zero customers, so I can afford to wait. I'd be absolutely freaking out right now if I had live customers.
What a company write in their TOS is an indication of what they intend to do. Broad scopes also means broad intentions (like startups).
You could read into that, that Vultr is intending to break the law in the EU, however little there is to do about it.
Its a liability for the customers knowing this. But it is also a liability for Vultr who will see it more difficult to establish in the EU, should that ever be wanted.
Additionally, ToS really don't count for much in the EU, they're usually not enforcable anyway, if there's anything out of the ordinary at all. There's a whole lot of stuff in ToS nobody is ever going to be able to enforce at all.
They probably expected to fly under the radar, without making sure it's even okay everywhere. Well, that's not going to happen I guess.
They obviously had an inent to start using the data for something, and given what I know about tech businesses, I wouldn't assume they only started once the ToS change was made. I would consider my data compromised.
The new ToS were surely a big project with tens of hours (or more) of research done for it.
The redditor's lawyer just picked up a phone and offered some gut response. My lawyer friends are happy to share their thoughts, but they usually tell me that they need to do research to provide reliable guidance.
The odds that they will ever be found out, that if found out they will be successfully sued, and that if that happens I will be made whole for whatever damage I have suffered, are slim.
The clause implies it is in their mind that they can play these games.
Better use a competitor that explicitly claims that you are renting the server for .. yourself.
I don't use Google Compute, but wonder if their terms are better. It would not surprise me at all if you allow Google to crawl all of your Compute instances and combine that with data from their many other sources (Chrome, Chrome OS, Android services, DNS servers, analytics, usage on their properties such GMaps/Youtube, etc.)
Nor does AWS, that I could find, except with the PartyRock created apps:
https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
Both of the above TOS explain intent, for example, to monitor data services for metrics. Vultr's clause (12.1) does not explain intent. The phrase "for purposes of providing services" is a vague intent.
Cloudflare #2 certainly is it: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/
>> You and your End Users (as such term is defined in the Privacy Policy) will retain all right, title and interest in and to any data, content, code, video, images or other materials of any type that you or your End Users transmit to or through the Services (collectively, “Customer Content”) in the form provided to Cloudflare. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, worldwide, royalty-free right to collect, use, copy, store, transmit, modify and create derivative works of Customer Content, in each case to the extent necessary to provide the Services.
but doesn't state as Vultr did: "and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" and Cloudflare uses the term "to the extent necessary" which to me seems more specific than a vague wording of "for providing services".
I'm not a lawyer, I'm interpreting this to the best of my abilities. In general, if something feels odd, it's best to back away.
Vultr on the other hand is just a bunch of compute/storage resources hooked up to pipes. They have a rudimentary CDN offering, but that's about it.
* I’m one of the founders
Section 12, https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/
When I was setting up my email server I requested to have port 25 opened, but instead of getting it opened I got some copy pasta reply from some senior director, how it can’t be done…
I moved to Hetzner, after 1 month and after the first bill was paid, I requested the same port opened and immediately it was opened.
I assume you submitted the ticket after seeing their support page, and mentioned why you were sending email.
Yes I followed the Vultr procedure
That's why is proceeded by "for purposes of providing the Services to you"
Nothing here... move away from the fake outrage.
Rubbish. That wouldn’t require an explicit and broad right to commercialise and profit from your content
The small portion dealing with piracy isn’t what the uproar is a out
I doubt the random blogs etc had much AI training value in the first place so this very much feels like an own goal
I’ll be migrating to Hetzner in any case.
Without the pipe dream of efficient homomorphic encryption you can’t protect your data from a hostile VPS provider.
it's still hilarious and absurd for them to lose some customers on something like this, they provide top notch service that competes very well with digitalocean linode scaleway etc.
I mean hey, could it be more clear and more ironclad that they aren't trying to steal your content? Yeah. But this is a customer service complaint, not a sensational news story.
Trying to claim an extraordinary right to hosted works would require extraordinary language in the agreement so that it would not be debatable that they could use the content for whatever they want. Just the fact we disagree about what it means puts it on a bad legal footing if their intent is to have unlimited license to everything in a VM. And that's not a position any company should put itself in. But if they don't do what you worry about, they are on perfectly fine legal footing.
A reasonable person would expect their fees or one-off payments for a myriad of technology products and services sufficient to cover their costs, and yet so many of these are being discreetly subsidised by the selling of customer data. The customer (knowingly or not) ostensibly agreed to that when agreeing to the EULAs.
Arguably that's how it works in general. What's stopping a hosting service from using the same modus operandi to allegedly be able to offer more competitive prices to their customers?
Googling the title leads to https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning..., which I guess is the same content? We can change the URL to that above.
Edit: oh, and I see several other commenters in the thread were already linking to that URL.
> whoa there, pardner! Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing.
It seems that reddit has now followed Xitter with requiring logins to drive engagement numbers, effectively rejecting the open web. Extractive screw turning was probably inevitable with the naive central-server design of webapps, but going through the destruction part of creative destruction still sucks.
Given the way of today's internet, with GPT-bots crawling your stuff without your permission to use in their services, and with search-engines crawling and generally providing means of content removal that have limited effect .... what else are Vultr supposed to do ?
If you are granting them permission to, for example, "display" your content. Then there's not much they can do if you cancel your Vultr account but your content remains part of the GPT training material ?
> what else are Vultr supposed to do ? Continue providing the services they do, with reasonable terms, or die. No, you can't just up and take all my photos and sell them to some AI training dataset because you wanted more money. Sorry!
I bought a HardKermel x64 servers and happy that I have no ToS to worry about. I can send encrypted back ups to utilize any cloud out there without a concern.
Could've tried Pi but some docker packages don't run on Arm.
Without a simple summarization for end users you can't just hide "unexpected" things in ToS-updates. And, well, a cloud-hoster deciding randomy to own your content hosted on servers you pay for is certainly neither expected nor typical.
Good luck enforcing anything of that, vultr.
Part 12.1: User Content
>You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you.
Emphasis mine. They have a perpetual license, but only for the purpose of providing services to you. This is a clause and many TOS, presumably to avoid copyright suits.
Nor does AWS, that I could find, except with the PartyRock created apps:
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/terms/
>2.5 Customer Content and Network Data
>2.5.1
>You and your End Users (as such term is defined in the Privacy Policy) will retain all right, title and interest in and to any data, content, code, video, images or other materials of any type that you or your End Users transmit to or through the Services (collectively, “Customer Content”) in the form provided to Cloudflare. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, worldwide, royalty-free right to collect, use, copy, store, transmit, modify and create derivative works of Customer Content, in each case to the extent necessary to provide the Services.
https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/
>10.2 Permitted Uses and Customer License Grant. Zoom will only access, process or use Customer Content for the following reasons (the “Permitted Uses”): (i) consistent with this Agreement and as required to perform our obligations and provide the Services; (ii) in accordance with our Privacy Statement; (iii) as authorized or instructed by you; (iv) as required by Law; or (v) for legal, safety or security purposes, including enforcing our Acceptable Use Guidelines. You grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary for the Permitted Uses.
https://www.notion.so/notion/Master-Subscription-Agreement-4...
>3.1 Customer Data. Customer and its licensors own the Customer Data, including all Intellectual Property Rights therein. No ownership rights in the Customer Data are transferred to Notion by this Agreement. Customer hereby grants Notion a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully-paid, sublicensable (to Notion’s third-party service providers) license to host, store, transfer, display, perform, reproduce, modify, create derivative works of, and distribute Customer Data in connection with its provision of the Services to Customer. [...]
https://huggingface.co/terms-of-service
>You hereby grant us a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, display, publish, reproduce, distribute, and make derivative works of such Content to provide Services and as otherwise permitted under these Terms and our Privacy Policy; and,
https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/pub...
>5.2 CUSTOMER OWNERSHIP. As between the parties, Customer and its licensors will retain all right, title, and interest in
>and to all IPR in Customer Data and Customer Technology. Customer grants to ServiceNow a royalty-free, fully paid, non-exclusive,
>non-transferrable (except under Section 11.1), worldwide, right to use Customer Data and Customer Technology solely to provide
>and support the Software.
None of them go so far as to say: "and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate"
Again, I'm not a lawyer, nor looking to become one, so anything that seems unusual, should be taken with caution in order to protect myself and my IP. I've seen what companies have done to independent developers, and I don't want to suffer a similar fate, only because I couldn't interpret TOS accurately.
My non-lawyer understanding of the policy is that, for the purpose of providing you with this service, they have the right to use your entire database to train and test the tool. They can even make a contract with OpenAI and sell your data to them for the purposes of building the AI service.
And it’s perpetual and irrevocable, so they can keep their models trained with your data if you decide to leave.
Hetzner. I am a customer of them. I run FreeBSD on the servers I rent.
The way that I got it installed was I did the following on each of the servers:
1. I booted the Hetzner Linux based recovery image on each of the servers. You can do this from the “Robot” web ui that Hetzner gives you access to for managing your servers.
2. Then I used dd to write an mfsBSD image to one of the HDDs and then rebooted
3. I then sshed into the server now running mfsBSD and then I used that to install FreeBSD.
As between You and Vultr, Vultr acknowledges that it claims no proprietary rights in or to Your Content. You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to copy, make derivative works, display, perform, use, broadcast and transmit on and via the Internet Your Content, solely for the benefit of You and to enable Vultr to perform its obligations under these Terms.
That's a silly exaggeration, of course. But you've certainly lost your right to make fun of admiralty-fringe style legal theories if you give things like this any credence.
Is it people's duty to default to 'I'm sure its fine' if they don't understand the wording, even if it reads to a normal person as if it is doing something against their interests?
If the default is 'assume good intentions' why have a contract at all, or why does the company not make it less far reaching and more accessible?
This 'blame the victim for being to dumb to understand what they must agree to, without being give notice or a chance to option out without being locked out of their account' is kind of misanthropic.
Vultrs indeed.
"... for purposes of providing the Services to you."
if you take the narrowest read, it would allow them to store or cache them. That's it.
It is a wildcard that allows them to do whatever they want with the data and then argue, "We deemed it appropriate."
I disclaim that "the Services" referred to in the Vultr hosting service's terms of service are mostly about social media forum data. It's therefore not really part of an alarming trend of sleazy business practices and scams of, basically, stealing enterprise user data. But what if? Then the neo-hacker reaction I introduced seems like a good lifestyle to embark on.
> commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate
Also, why perpetual?
They are essentially data processor, they act on your behalf and should not do things with data that you have not asked for.
Non-exclusive: Vultr does not have exclusive rights to your content. You can grant similar rights to others.
Perpetual: The rights you grant are everlasting.
Irrevocable: You cannot take back these rights once they are granted.
Royalty-free: Vultr does not have to pay you for the use of your content.
Fully paid-up: No future payments will be required from Vultr to you for the use of your content.
Worldwide license: Vultr can use your content anywhere in the world.
Right to sublicense through multiple tiers: Vultr can grant these rights to other parties, who can then grant them to further parties, and so on.
To use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit, and distribute your content: Vultr can do just about anything with your content, including modifying it and sharing it, in any current or future media or format.
In any way that Vultr deems appropriate: Vultr has the discretion to use your content however it sees fit.
Without any further consent, notice, and/or compensation to you or to any third parties: Vultr does not need to ask for your permission, inform you, or pay you or anyone else to exercise these rights.
For purposes of providing the Services to you: The clause often stipulates that these rights are granted to Vultr so they can operate, improve, and promote their services effectively.
This type of clause is common in the terms of service for online platforms and services. It essentially allows the service provider to operate their platform efficiently, showcase user-generated content, and adapt and improve services without needing to seek permission from users each time they need to handle content. It’s important for users to understand these terms, as they significantly affect how one's content can be used and shared by the service provider.
This comment reeks like ChatGPT generated content, tbh.
> showcase user-generated content
What? Am I unaware of some service they offer? I don't want an infrastructure provider doing anything with my content. They shouldn't even have access to anything that's not publicly accessible unless someone needs one-off access to help with a support incident.
It's not "content" for a lot of customers. It's private, proprietary information. What if someone is using Vultr to host an app for a company that requires an NDA from the webdev? Are they stuck in limbo as of right now?
The Vultr account owner might not even be the owner of the data hosted in the account. The whole thing is crazy. How are there people here defending this as "normal"?
ChatGPT may eat those legal disco companies, too
> You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to copy, make derivative works, display, perform, use, broadcast and transmit on and via the Internet Your Content, solely for the benefit of You and to enable Vultr to perform its obligations under these Terms.
Given Vultr has a distributed CDN service, could not the "copy", "display", "broadcast" and "transmit" parts be charitably interpreted as part of that agreement? i.e. them serving your content via the CDN?
Edit: it looks like they've updated it already from what the blog post quotes it as?
The quoted sentence is literally just licensing Vultr to actually serve your content. It may seem baroque but this is the reality of engineering back-translated into legalese to comply with centuries of common law precedent. So, excuse our byzantine APIs but that's how we've always done things around here, so sayeth the lawyerfolken.
My experience with Vultr has been excellent. Very affordable pricing for on demand PAYG VMs and bandwidth. Good service, and as responsive service as you can expect from a small customer team.
Abundant reliability (not to conflagrate any Linodials, but the reliability of their systems appears better than that now-spawn-of Akamai).
I left because I couldn't use LVM, the fact they need to know disk geometry for a VM never sat well with me.
I'm under no illusion, I know the host needs to be trusted, but this is a weird/gross implementation.
>(...) you take the necessary measures to protect minors from accessing harmful material on your website.
>(...) requirements apply to you, including removing any infringing content and safeguarding minors.
and threaten me with "law enforcement agencies"
Bravo, bravo...
In this case, I believe this is due to the introduction of their CDN product, though it would also apply to their object storage product as well.
Your blanket claim regarding unverifiability is especially astounding because this one is easily verifiable. The evidence is right here, for everyone to see.
https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/
Speaking of unverifiable claims,
> In this case, I believe this is due to the introduction of their CDN product
That’s pure guessing. More importantly, it doesn’t change the egregiousness of this ToS is even if that’s the case.
Also,
> disregarding the context due to which it has arisen
There is absolutely no context in which screwing over customers like that is okay.