[weinzierl]

The phrasing is pretty standard, the important part is the middle sentence. Often it includes irrevocable, transferable and sublicensable as well.

That being said, I hate "remains your property" part. It's just fluff that changes nothing, but distracts from the following sentence.

[Gormo]

The reason why this is standard is because functionally, anything that receives data from a user, hosts it, and transmits it to third parties is engaging in distribution of copyrighted content. Without a grant of license, pretty much every message board, social media platform, or any website or internet-based application that does anything with user-generated data could be exposed to copyright liability. You may note that this very site's legal declarations page includes an identical clause.

"Remains your property" is not fluff at all, and explicitly disclaims any ownership of rights associated with content you post, and equivalently indemnifies users against any liability for re-posting or re-using content they posted here, which they'd potentially be exposed to if they were assigning copyright to the hosting platform rather than just granting a license.

[j45]

Stating you own it, and then licensing it away in the sentence after to give yourself irrevocable rights seems duplicitous.

Neat looking service though.

[Gormo]

No, it's definitely not duplicitous, and is standard practice across the industry.

It boils down to "we're not claiming to own the rights to your content -- you still retain those -- but we need a grant of permission from you to ensure that we can publish it on our own site without facing possible liability".

[j45]

Or.. it's industry standard duplicity.

This isn't specifically an issue with this service alone (I like it), but the approach to UGC (user generated content) in general.

What's unclear is what rights or license remain if someone deletes their account and content. It's trivial to clarify, making omission is a decision.

Use of the word "improving" is pretty general and broad, and can be about the priorities of the vendor over the customer.

What's missing is the clause that closes the loop and doesn't give them a lifetime license.

"you grant Supertone a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, and display content solely for the purpose of operating and improving Supertone Shift."

[Gormo]

Its open-ended, yes, but that does not imply any duplicity. Platform providers have an incentive to minimize their liability exposure, so they're not going to volunteer to add language that applies additional qualifications and exceptions, but that does not in itself imply that any deception or abuse is going on.

It's certainly proper to call out examples of actual bad behavior by specific organizations, but not so much to treat defensive boilerplate as though it is itself bad behavior.

[weinzierl]

"Remains your property" is not fluff at all, and explicitly disclaims any ownership of rights associated with content you post,

I think that should not be necessary to do explicitly because it is the default state. At any rate it is weird to talk about IP assignment in the very same paragraph as licensing.

[mistrial9]

that is totally dependent on the jurisdictions involved, and modified by the agreement that the user accepts to start the service(s) no?

[Gormo]

It's part of the agreement that the user accepts to use the service, and there are frameworks in place that already implement cross-jurisdictional reciprocity for things like copyright licenses.