If they didn't have that (or something similar) they couldn't serve the image to other users. Well, they could, but without something like that someone will sue them for showing a picture they uploaded to someone they didn't want to see it (or any number of other gotchas).
They store the image or video (host/copy), distribute it over their network and to users (use/run), they resize it and change the image format (modify/translate), their site then shows it to the user (display/derivative work), and they can't control the setting in which a user might choose to pull up an image they have access to (the "publically" caveat)
It sounds like a lot, but AFAIK that's what that clause covers and why it's necessary for any site like them.
It certainly does cover the needs of hosting and display to other users, but it doesn't permit just that. It's expansive enough to let them do just about anything they could imagine with the pictures.
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.
Training generative ML tools is qualitatively different from showing on website, even if both are technically “derivative works”, so this is a massive bait-and-switch. Is it the first time something is acceptable by the letter of pre-existing law but not the spirit?
> Is it the first time something is acceptable by the letter of pre-existing law but not the spirit?
Well .. no. It happens each time that Google et. al find a new way to use your data. It's what all we German "privacy nuts" have warned people about for years and the reason that the older German data protection laws and now EU regulations require you to state exactly what you are doing with data ("purpose limitation"). If companies can just write "oh well, we will use it for something" how can anyone evaluate whether they should accept without knowing the future? Right. They cant.
So, this could be another case of the EU kicking Facebook in the face. We'll see.
They store the image or video (host/copy), distribute it over their network and to users (use/run), they resize it and change the image format (modify/translate), their site then shows it to the user (display/derivative work), and they can't control the setting in which a user might choose to pull up an image they have access to (the "publically" caveat)
It sounds like a lot, but AFAIK that's what that clause covers and why it's necessary for any site like them.