"Betrayed"? This is so sensational for what amounts to a misunderstanding of a sentence in legal terms that is just long enough for customers (well, Reddit at least) to lose the context. But not for a court, "for purposes of providing the Services to you" is an important part that you shouldn't gloss over just because it's at the end of the sentence.
"Just"? A blog post written this week for terms that have been there since 2021?
A hosting provider suddenly gave themselves a license to do anything they want with the stuff you put on their server. How is that not a betrayal? You trusted them to host your stuff without, for example, re-selling it. They broke that trust.
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 anything they do with the content can be explained away as "necessary to provide the service". That's the problem: they're not constraining themselves in any way. They need money to provide the service, so why couldn't they decide that taking art I put on my server and selling it to people is "necessary to provide the service"? It seems like they could at any time decide that their pricing is unsustainable, so monetising customer content is "necessary to provide the service".
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"
> And anything they do with the content can be explained away as "necessary to provide the service". That's the problem: they're not constraining themselves in any way. They need money to provide the service, so why couldn't they decide that taking art I put on my server and selling it to people is "necessary to provide the service"? It seems like they could at any time decide that their pricing is unsustainable, so monetising customer content is "necessary to provide the service".
Firstly, as I've said in posts that you've replied to, the Services here are their forums and website. Your Vultr account is used both to purchase VMs and to post comments on their forums. "Services" in the agreement refers to their websites, pretty clearly.
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.
I haven't seen any comments quoting the TOS that support this being non-hosting services only, even though the CEO is saying that's the case. When looking at the TOS it seems to make very clear that it's talking about all of its services, including hosting services.
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.
"Just"? A blog post written this week for terms that have been there since 2021?