Copyright terms on user-uploaded material

I was recently in contact with the author of a short story, which was translated into over 20 languages and released on a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, asking if I could get people to record the audio of various translations and share them on LingQ.

He said that he was happy for me to get people to record the audio, and send them to him for sharing on his site, but that he wasn’t happy to have his material shared here under LingQ’s terms of service, which he quoted as follows:

" > Our Rights. We will own all right, title and interest in the Content,

including all rights in any copy, translation, modification,
adaptation or derivation of the Content. We shall have the sole and
exclusive right throughout the universe in all languages and in
perpetuity to use and exploit all or any part of the Content and all
or any part of any material contained therein or prepared therefor,
whether or not used therein, in any format or version, by any means
and in any media,"

I was not sure where he found this text, and preferred not to bother him unnecessarily to ask, since he would already be doing me and fellow language learners a favour by hosting the audio on his own site, but this seems to contradict the relevant sections of the LingQ Terms of Service that I was able to find here Terms of Service for LingQ - which says
“1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting certain types of your data to be shared publicly, you agree to allow others to view and share your Content.
[…]
3. All content on LingQ.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.”

Looking into it a bit more, it turns out that there are two URLs that turn up when you google ‘LingQ Terms of Service’, and I had been looking at the first one - Terms of Service for LingQ whereas he had presumably been looking at the second one - Terms of Service for LingQ which contains the text he quoted. That latter one says it was last updated in 2012, whereas the first one doesn’t seem to say when it was updated.

So, in the hope of being able to resolve the confusion and, hopefully, persuade the person I was speaking with to allow his content to be shared here, can you clarify what exactly is the official position regarding intellectual property rights on user-uploaded content here?

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Thanks for the heads up. I’m not sure why that paragraph is in there nor why we have two terms of service pages. The second page Terms of Service for LingQ is the most up to date page. We will take down the other page. However, we will also look at that paragraph and see why it’s in there and whether it can be removed. In fact, we don’t need the rights for content shared on LingQ. In fact, we have no intention of doing anything with these texts other than making them available for LingQ users to study on LingQ. I will let you know.

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So if I share something on LingQ, and later decide to delete or make it private, LingQ has no intention of asserting ownership of that content, correct?

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That’s correct.

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