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Only insofar as legal precedent has established it to mean that. If someone sues you for a use that hasn't been found in court to fall under this clause it will be more difficult to win that case.

IANAL, and my jargon may be off, but I think that in the scenario where you get sued for something that's been litigated to fall under this clause in the past, you can basically say "even if we assume the evidence and claims are accurate, it's obviously in the clear based on prior cases", if the judge agrees, you win without going to trial, which is a "summary judgement" I think.

On the flip side, if someone is trying to apply the clause in a novel, not previously litigated way, you're way less likely to get that summary judgement and it will have to be argued in court.

It works the other way too, if I wrote a eula that used different phrasing than what's been established prior, say to make it more obviously cover just the normal stuff for user uploaded images, summary judgement is less likely to succeed because no court had ever weighed in on my novel phrasing as covering those actions in that way.

There's also the risk that if you make the phrasing too narrow (specifying resizing of the image) then when a new tech comes along that's reasonable to apply (e.g. some ML process to derive a 3d scene from images, or make them) exactly zero user uploaded images you store at that point could benefit from that until you go back and ask the user to agree to that too. The question then becomes how worth is narrowing the wording when you can accidentally paint yourself into a corner.

Or how about if it had been phrased "display on a monitor" had been used years back pre-smartphone era? You could be sued for making user uploaded media available to view on phones since that wasn't in the license granted to you by your users!

When you cover all the little edge cases, you end up with the seemingly overbroad clause most companies use.

An important thing to remember is that the legal interpretation of a text can differ almost arbitrarily from the plain English meaning of the text as written.




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