Does nobody read the fineprint?
By submitting, posting, or publishing your content, suggestions, enhancement requests, recommendations, feedback, information, data, or comments (“Content”) to any Website or Online Service, you are granting Cloudflare a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license (with the right to sublicense) to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works of your Content.
If you're ok with that, fine. But I'm not.
If you don’t give them a license to display the works you give them to display, how can they legally display it?
Perpetual and irrevocable? And with the right to modify, not just display?
You do not need all that.
and "(with the right to sublicense)"
If my company presented such user agreement I would be quickly reported by users to local Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, audited, fined, and ordered to change that.
I think this would be even challenged at the level of "Abusive clauses registry" that office maintains, so the agreement would be quickly overruled in court.
If no specific clause would be challenged, this is an example of "grossly violates the consumer's interests" rule.
How is big tech allowed to push this shit anywhere? How is this legal in civilized world?
Perhaps the same way that Github works when you host your web page there. I.e. A revocable, limited license, where you retain full ownership, and only grant them permission to host and serve your content + a limited set of other uses, and you dictate external licensing?
Here, drop all your data into this vortex -- we need it for our next web site builder AI model.
Yes, but this is the perfect circle of slop: generate an ai landing page, throw it into cloudflare drop, ai adopts it, start all over again. For genuine, professional content, I would assume, almost no one uses cloudflare drop, as they already have something in place to test and quickly host some page. Moreover, I expect that scammers and phishing campaigns will have a use for it to quickly up some landing page without leaving a large footprint.
It's not like every SaaS wasn't using the same style of landing page before AI.
It states more than just display: 'to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works'
Can this be a necessary legal framing for technical purposes, to allow converting of pictures to different resolutions, or adapt the content to mobile views, and such things?
Unlikely. It goes further by also using the word "exploit".
If they needed permissions for conversion, they'd have made a specific mention of that and thereafter confirmed legal ownership.
TBH, I like that the word “exploit” is in there. It feels more honest and if it were not present!
I mean, even all else aside - why would they need a "perpetual, irrevocable" licence?
To me this looks like legal preparation for selling their users' datasets for AI training purposes.
Basically the same phrasing was widespread before LLMs were invented. So I don't think it's specifically motivated by that.
Hoarding massive amounts of data for the success of machine learning algorithms was a thing long before LLMs were a thing too. Remember the neural networks hype that kicked off around 2010? LLMs didn't even challenge the prevalent paradigms of deep learning: "Most of the value of deep learning is where you can get a lot of data" or "Data is the new oil".
This is more-or-less standard boilerplate from _long_ before the current AI training even existed. It basically means “we can do anything we like with it, now and at any time in the future, including selling it and passing these rights on to anyone else we chose, but don't take ownership so we can't be held responsible for it”.
Officially it means they can legally do wat you want them to do (present the content to users, perhaps transforming it in various ways for some or all viewers), but of course it covers them being able to do far more than that.
Perpetual and irrevocable? Derivative works?
Derivative could just be "let CF append your Google Analytics tag and that funny cursor-follower script.
Perpetual is way harder to justify though.
Derivative works I understand. That would include transforming the content for some/all viewers. Making it mobile-friendly or otherwise reformatting for display, for instance, or adding affordances for accessibility, or for long content adding a generated summary.
Irrevocable and right-to-sublicense are the red flags for me. Nothing a company sells to us is irrevocable, but everything they take from us is expected to be.
With the right to sublicense. They can literally sell your stuff
I'm always really doubtful this is applicable in the end, especially in the EU. You can't give up all your copyright like this
You can't give up the right to sign your work with your name. But you can definitely share rights to reproduce your work etc — although perhaps not in a clickable EULA.
In Austria and Germany, you just cannot transfer the copyright ("Urheberrecht"). You can only transfer - meaning sell - the right of use ("Nutzungsrecht"). The only exception I know of is with employments, where the employer is the rightful copyright holder. The US, Switzerland, and maybe other legislations allow for the transfer of copyright.
I believe we are talking about the same thing.
Regardless, I'm not one to use or otherwise promote such shitty behavior.
Not sure why cloudflare seems to be in such good standing on hn.
Early on, they had 30 points of presence with 11 employees - cool, but especially cool to John Galt fans.
Maybe, but you may not afford to find out.
It's a spectrum. I don't think that they will be able to sell t-shirts using a drawing you've uploaded. But it will probably allow them to defend themselves a bit better if they get sued for selling the data for LLM training.
You beat me to it, I was going to post the same.
Clear red flag, only useful for whistleblowers.
> your content
Wouldn't it be fun to upload content of a big music label or smth like that?
> By submitting, posting, and publishing your Content, you represent and warrant that your Content, does not: (i) infringe, violate, or misappropriate any third-party right, including any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, privacy right, right of publicity, or any other intellectual property or proprietary right; or (ii) slander, defame, or libel any third-party.
Thank you for highlighting this :)
This is true, but: you should see how many other cloud services have these terms. It's very insidious.
People are losing the ability to read. Lots of high schoolers are incapable of reading properly already. Attention spans shrink. We got some fun times ahead of us.
We need these legal texts as short form TikTok content I am afraid.
I have plenty of ability to read, but I never read these T&Cs because they’re usually dozens of pages long and life’s too short (or, if you prefer, the cost/benefit doesn’t support it). For consumers in Europe, at least, it’s usually safe to assume that anything too shitty is unenforceable, which helps.
Being “unenforceable” doesn’t stop them making your life a misery in the process, ruining your credit rating etc.
As an EUian,I've never given one care about my credit rating. I don't even know if I have one.
They can cause a long drawn out court battle, and abuse your data. Noyb is the real-world example here. Most companies depend on not being sued, and will fold if a regulater sends them notice.
A good idea for a Firefox extension. Something that parses T&C's and pops up a DANGER warning on a page.
https://tosdr.org/en
What life is too short for is being screwed over by and having to deal with the consequences of some agreement you were too lazy to read. These aren’t half as inscrutable as you think; after you read a couple you get a feel for them and can breeze through, honing on the parts that are important to you. I don’t need to spend more than a couple of minutes on a TOS before understanding if it’s awful or reasonable, and it has stopped me from opening accounts on services with truly awful provisions.
I mean, that's fair. To an extent it depends how high the stakes are and whether there are realistic alternatives to a service.
Here's Cloudflare's T&C in comic form, for those with short attention spans.
https://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/post/41879001445/the-intern...
We need the polar opposite of that: Laws that ensure companies can’t put unreasonable clauses in fine print or long EULAs. That’s the way it works in many EU countries, and it’s a blessing.
Nobody except lawyers should have to bother with legalese.
That would require you to consult a lawyer for everything you do... I personally couldn't afford that.
No body is stealing your blog, relax its boiler plate
every website ever (except for github) has this exact same clause and everytime it's posted online, people freak out about it lol
>"everyone is doing it so stop complaining bro!!!!"
They will train AI on your shit.