Vultr is now claiming full perpetual commercial rights over all hosted content

You are probably looking for this summary [1]:

    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.

This entire saga could be reframed as "5-day old Reddit account wildly misinterprets Vultr ToS, causing drama-thirsty social media users to spread it far and wide, generating the company a ton of negative press." — Vultr has released a statement explaining, they clarified their point yet the news is still going around the block.

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.

I hadn't heard of Vultr before, so out of curiosity I had a look. I am actually in the market for some lower-end cloud services.

- 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...

Worth noting that Vultr has responded and modified their TOS to remove those terms.

https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Serv...

How does it apply to VPS instances? Do they snapshot them and scan the filesystem for content?

I’ll be migrating to Hetzner in any case.

From one of the Reddit commenters:

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.

I'm not a lawyer, I don't know what that means, but it is disturbing enough to make me leave. If they don't want me to leave, they should clarify their intent.

Part 12.1: User Content

https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/

Why is this submission flagged?

I'm not seeking to defend Vultr here, but perhaps people need to think about this in a sensible manner.

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 ?

I'm guessing they're about to make some kind of generative-AI play and need access to more data.

"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?

Everyone (maybe rightfully) up in arms, but I imagine you would need an agreement like this is they were finally getting on board with something like elastic compute. Everytime they spin up a new machine on your behalf they're essentially redistributing all the files on that machine. I understand everyones gun shy, but I've been using Vultr for years and I'm much less suspicious of them than the likes of google/amazon. I've personally never had an issue with them, but I definitely think it's a healthy response to go fight or flight when you're essentially signing all your rights away.

This passage is a clause from a legal agreement, typically found in the terms of service for a platform or service provider like Vultr. It outlines the rights you, as a user, are granting to Vultr regarding any content you create or upload while using their services. Let's break it down for clarity:

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.

Not sure it says what you think/want it to say:

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.

I could not find anything similar in Linode (Akamai) TOS:

https://www.linode.com/legal/

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.

What are the best VPS' these days who stay out of your hair and protect users?

The cause is retrained by

"... 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.

This is a standard clause so you can't sue them for providing pirated stuff when you our your users placed it on their servers.

That's why is proceeded by "for purposes of providing the Services to you"

Nothing here... move away from the fake outrage.

I look at it like this, if your data is on the internet, anyone can do anything they want with it, period.

A Reddit post incorrectly took portions of our Terms of Service out of context, which only pertain to content provided to Vultr on our public mediums (community-related content on public forums, as an example) for purposes of rendering the needed services – e.g., publishing comments, posts, or ratings. This is separate from a user’s own, private content that is deployed on Vultr services.

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...

Let's do one thing, host Nintendo content and since vultr now has commercial rights over "my uploads" let's see how Nintendo bites them in the ass. This can be done and dusted in a few days given enough traction

They appear to be appropriately named

I wish people stopped posting threads from Reddit, because they are either full of unverifiable claims (like a post from some time ago that claimed a coworker was messing around with their computer for the last five years), or in this case, outrage sought for the sake of outrage and disregarding the context due to which it has arisen.

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.

I need new hosting service for Subreply. Any good providers?

Corrected link: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...

wrong link

Gross

Well, time to move away from Vultr. Luckily I don't have too much over there other than some small projects.

Vultr is way too expensive

We are in the kind of future that the fear of being trained by AI makes people abandond services if they show any suspicion

The good thing about this outrage is that it creates a downside to just slapping piles of bullshit into your ToS. Hopefully, this will make companies more careful with what they write there, leading to shorter, more understandable, and less user-hostile terms.

The language seems have been added mid-2021, so it's not new.

Way too many companies see hosted content from paying customers as free real estate they can copy and sell to others training AI datasets.

Vultrs indeed.

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...

i just migrated to vultr cause of minial api and interface. really hate it when stakeholders make founders take foolish decision :/. guess I'll use linode or something now

“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.”

Section 12, https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/

That particular Vulture certainly won't fly in the EU.

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.

I mean, if anybody's surprised, their name is literally a dehydrated version of the word "vulture"

This is caused by a misunderstanding of legalese. Unfortunately there's no easy cure for this. But I do suggest a dose of ChatGPT to provide perspective (tho, in a nod to pedants and pearl-clutchers, I must concede that you should not sell everything you own, abandon your worldly cares and trust your entire legal stack to ChatGPT, just in case you were instigated to do so by my prior sentence).

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).

Sometimes I feel like I'd be okay with all terms of service and privacy policies changing to "We can do what we want, and you can do nothing, forever" just so we never have to deal with Reddit's finest legal minds attempting to read them.

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.

i also opened a ticket about it and support rep responded about it being addressed.

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.

My law professor told me to never sign a contract I didn't modify in some way, so I usually change these to be something I like better before hitting accept.

The Name

If you have a valid API key, this still works. If you delete node in the dev tools, you can see the page behind it - but it still comes back on the next page.

Fitting for a company named vulture.

Nomen est omen, it seems?

If you’re looking for a new GPU cloud because of this, we’ve put all these providers in on place, console, and API so you can find a new one for your needs at https://shadeform.ai

* I’m one of the founders

That’s remarkable. I’m a huge fan of vultr and I don’t want to believe that this has been done in bad faith, but of course long experience sadly suggests otherwise.

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”!

Follow-up:

A Note About Vultr's Terms of Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865941

Keep calm and carrion

I am now investigating alternatives for hosting FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems. Preferably that take custom installs.

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.

I mean, it does read badly, and maybe the worst should be assumed, but at the same time:

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?

Would anyone work with these people after they did this? They pivoted because they got caught, not because they are trust worthy. They clearly thought a lot, in concert with counsel, about how they could try to steal people's IP. Geniuses thought no one would read the TOS.

Don't know anything about the topic, but the name of the service is "Vultr". When people tell you who they are, believe them.

There's no way this can get enforced

Well at least the name is fitting.

On top of all this you can't access your account without accepting new ToS. After login web page show full window modal form with one button "confirm" so you can't reject it. I'm sure most of HN readers can handle this minor obstacle ;-) After I asked vultr for access to my account without acceptance of new ToS they wrote me back legal slur suggesting I may host questionable content:

(...) 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...

Section 15c in the ToS seems different from the quote in the article:

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 one way to ensure your company only hosts worthless shit.

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 was a vultr user for years. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on their services.

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.

Update:

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)

Not only are those terms overreaching, they are copied from elsewhere. Search with Google for "a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers)" and you get quite a few hits. Mostly from small businesses.

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?