Jane,
? I'd very much like to hear a thorough explanation and discussion -
lawyers' arguments in plain English - of everything I have underlined.
IANAL ("I Am Not A Lawyer"), but here's my understanding.
_any_
Messages, Photos, Files, Wiki content, etc.
_you hereby grant and will grant Groups.io and its affiliated
companies_
hereby - By accepting this agreement. The "and will grant" I'm not as sure of, but I think the lawyer is extending your grant to future time because you will be uploading new content after "now". The affiliated companies would be any companies that Groups.io contracts with, for example purchasing online storage from AWS (Amazon Web Services).
_royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sub licensable or,
perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform,
distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content_
Well, there's a mouthful.
Although you retain copyright to your contributions, this license (aka "permission") means that you can't ask Groups.io to pay for your content, to take down your content, nor can you restrict how they use it. EXCEPT
in connection with the operation of the Service.
Is usually interpreted to mean that they can't use your content in their advertising or in some other service of theirs. That meaning is backed up by the following sentence:
The Company will not use any User Content you provide to any email
group for any purpose other than to provide the Services, for the
operation of the Services and to otherwise improve or enhance the
Services.
"The Service" is limited by the Services Description section near the top. Which is remarkably terse!
Services Description
The Service is designed to make it easy to create, manage, run and
find email groups.
So, in the event you got into a legal contest with Groups.io, the lawyers would make hay arguing about whether a given use (or from your point of view, misuse) falls within that description.
The key thing that caught my eye was "perpetual, irrevocable". Contrast this with the last sentence of section 9.1 of Yahoo's TOS:
This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to
include such Content on the Yahoo Services and will terminate at the
time you remove or Yahoo removes such Content from the Yahoo Services.
So, Yahoo allows you to remove (delete) your content, and when you do Yahoo loses its license to display or use it. In fact, there have been times (when Yahoo Customer Care was more active than now) when a former member of a group could call upon Customer Care to delete their content even when the moderators of the group removed the member specifically to prevent such removal. Customer Care would ask the group owner to delete the content, or allow the former member back in to delete it, on penalty of having the group itself deleted by Customer Care. So they took that clause of the TOS seriously.
Shal
Shal Farley