I am not a lawyer but I have seen startups distort/rationalize legal language as their tech services evolve to grandfather new situations into old language.

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.

"an adversarial position" is the only position you should assume when interpreting legal texts. After all, if push comes to shove, your the actual adversary. And in any other case the legal text is not needed.

Assume that immediately after executing any contract, the counterparty will be purchased by the Devil. Draft accordingly within reason.

They want permission to commercialise my content "for purposes of providing the Services to" me?

First time I hear such requirement

They offer services like store fronts. This might require them to sell your stuff and accept credit cards on your behalf.

https://www.vultr.com/marketplace/apps/woocommerce/

Ah I was not aware of this, I guess it makes sense then? They could make this section of the ToS specific to their marketplace/store front products

That’s an easy one: the company exists to provide The Services, revenue from commercialising the content supports the company.

That's the basis for any business model where you are the product.

> That's the basis for any business model where you are the product.

True but most times, when you are the product, the service is free. In this case you pay for the service.

They do offer relatively inexpensive solutions, though. And LinkedIn is a good example of a business whose revenues are largely made from sharing and harvesting data from both paid and free users for the benefit of some of those paying users, and some third parties, too.

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.

Then look at the TOS of Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram.

Yeah sorry I meant in the context of cloud providers

Does it change anything? Paraphrasing:

"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".

The question is: how would your lawyer read it.

They don't need a licence, and a very wide one, to do this.

That's probably not a legal opinion they paid for.

Knowing lawyers, it was probably sloppily copied from another ToS they (or not even them) wrote.

So they have a perpetual right to your contend, for as long as they are providing you a service.

Either way you read it, it seems like poor wording.

Perpetual means continuing forever, so why would it end at the end of the services?

If you ask your parents if you can stay up late to finish your homework essay, it should follow that you only gain that right until the essay is finished.

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.

"Selling copies of your genome to partners enables us to affordably provide the service, therefore you agreed to it."