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by winkle 551 days ago
First place I usually go is the terms of service and what they are granting themselves rights to. Not excited about how broad this is "3.2 License: By using the Services, you hereby grant to Cognition, its affiliates, successors, and assigns a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable, transferable license to reproduce, distribute, modify, and otherwise use, display, and perform all acts with respect to the Customer Data as may be necessary for Cognition to provide the Services to you."
2 comments

"as may be necessary for Cognition to provide the Services to you" kind of makes sense IMO. Does that mean they'll only use the license (note: they only get a license, not ownership) to provide services to you? Is it a restriction?
Yes, that clause/phrase restricts the company's rights with respect to their license to your data. Essentially, a clause like that is necessary for users to interact with the service. Makes sense when you think about it, how can they provide service if they can't use the data you provide them?

It's a pretty typical clause you'll see in most SaaS policies.

Source: I work for a SaaS, but I am not a lawyer, caveat emptor.

I want to pay for their product, but not enough that I have to ask my lawyer about the language. I did see that one of the features of the enterprise plan is custom terms, but that's not the plan I'm interested in.
How do you use other Saas products or is this the first one you consider using ?
I always wonder how enforceable these blanket rights would be in court. Didn’t Meta claim to own end users’ photos in the T&Cs back around 2009 and it got challenged and shot down (ianal)?
I did some Googling on this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111103081406/http://consumeris...

Original article that caused the outrage. In particular, the TOS did not say they owned your pictures, but it did give them a license that was quite broad, which included using your likeness in advertisements. However, the change that caused the outrage was that the license no longer expired on account deletion nor content removal.

https://www.npr.org/2009/02/17/100783689/facebook-users-angr...

News article about the outrage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/technology/internet/19fac...

News article about the walkback.

I could not find anything about it being challenged in court.