Why Vercel terms of service require a broad license for user content

Excerpt from the new Terms of Service / “3. Your content”:

By submitting Your Content on or through the Services, you grant Vercel a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, display, publish, store, perform, and create derivatives of Your Content to provide and improve the Services, develop new products and services, secure and protect the Services and third parties from fraud, abuse, malware, malicious files or content, viruses and the like.

Explain to me how this normal and/or legal?

The license allows Vercel to:

  • Display and deliver your content when people visit your sites
  • Create CDN copies and caches for better performance
  • Scan for malware and security threats
  • Improve our platform features

This doesn’t mean Vercel claims ownership of your content.

However, I believe you may be reaching out because of the recent ToS update. The change was primarily about Ai model training preferences, which you can control in Settings → Data Preferences. That is separate from the basic content license needed to host and serve your applications.

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