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There Are Some Super Shady Things In Oculus Rift's Terms of Service (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: While the [Oculus Rift] is cool, like any interesting gadget, it's worth looking through the Terms of Service, because there are some worrisome things included. Quite a few of the items in the document are pretty typical in any sort of Terms of Service agreement. These include details like waiving your right to a juried trial and agreeing to go into arbitration instead. Oculus can also terminate your service for myriad reasons, and third parties can collect information on you. However, there are some even more devilish details in the Rift's full Terms of Service. If you create something with the Rift, the Terms of Service say that you surrender all rights to that work and that Oculus can use it whenever it wants, for whatever purposes. Basically, if you create something using the device, Oculus can't own it, but the company can use it -- and they don't have to pay you for for using it. Oculus can use it even if you don't agree with its use. Oculus can collect data from you while you're using the device. Furthermore, the information that they collect can be used to directly market products to you. As UploadVR noted, the Oculus Rift is a device that is always on (much like Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect feature) which leads to further concerns about when the information will be collected.
This x1000. The article is making mountains out of mole hills it appears. Only content the end-user chooses to submit to the oculus services is treated in that way, as you have pointed out.
The summary really makes this whole thing seem worse than it is by insinuating that all user-generated content will be owned by oculus. Have the slashdot "editors" (and I use that term loosely) even taken the time to READ the actual Terms of Service? If you didn't then you are lazy and inept and shouldn't be in the job you are in. If you did then you are deliberately misrepresenting the facts to suite your own narrative.
So BeauHD, which are you? Incompetent or Malicious?
So, they need some of this language just to do what you're signing up for.
No they don't. They don't need permissions to use a device for its purpose. If I hire a recording studio (who employ third-party technicians & rent some of the equipment from 'the cloud'), then I don't need to give them any "rights" so they can store temporarily the music I make. good or bad - that music is MINE.
If I rent a phone answering machine for my company - I don't need to grant any permissions even if they're storing stuff 'in the cloud'. I may sing my copyrighted song into the answering machine - they still don't need any 'permission' to reproduce the performance for whoever I was calling.
Oh, and in the same vein: If I use a 'Rift' with a custom avatar and sing my song during a meeting, they need no 'boilerplate' permission for delivering that song to the other participants. No more than the phone company need permission when I sing over the phone. (The phone is digital and involves 'the cloud' too these days.) It is all lies – they only need these permissions to 'steal' stuff for using for their own purposes. Of course, it won't be stealing if you sign away your rights like a sheep . . .