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Google Updates Chrome's Terms of Service
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Sep 04, 2008 08:24 PM
from the credit-where-due dept.
from the credit-where-due dept.
centuren writes "In response to the reaction to Chrome's terms of service, Google has truncated the offending Section 11, apologizing for the oversight. The new Section 11 contains only the first sentence included in their Universal Terms of Service, now stating: 'You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.'"
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The 5 Most Laughable Terms of Service On the Net 399 comments
nicholas.m.carlson writes "According to these five terms of service and EULA, Google owns any content you create using its Chrome browser and can filter your Gmail messages if it likes. Facebook says it can sell its users' uploaded images as stock photography. YouTube can keep footage of your kids forever, even after you've deleted it from the site. And AOL can ban you for using vulgar language on AIM. Funny, right? That's why Valleywag calls them 'The 5 most laughable terms of service on the Net.'"
Reader dlaudel writes, regarding the previously-mentioned Google EULA for Chrome, "According to Ars Technica, Google's EULA for Chrome was just copy-and-pasted from its EULA for other services, a practice that is apparently common at Google."
[+]
Technology: Google Claims User Content In Multiple Products 166 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Google last week removed some language in its Chrome browser's terms of service that gave the company a license to any material displayed in the browser, but that language remains in several other Google products, including its Picasa photo service and its Blogger service."
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Google Chrome (Score:5, Funny)
Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure I've copied/reused code. But when I do I usually make sure I understand what it does and works correctly. I also don't work for a mega corporation that has entire brigades of lawyers to get paid to look at these very things. Google apparently didn't understand what it meant nor had any of the many lawyers who get paid to look at these types of things actually look at it.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do keep in mind that the thing is barely in beta. They're not really releasing it to the public. Besides, it's basically unenforceable, since the code is under a BSD license.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
It's available for download on their main page. This seems to me that they really are releasing it to the public.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
Some people are trying to make it a new punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
"We apologise again for the fault in the
TOS. Those responsible for sacking
the people who have just been sacked,
have been sacked."
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
"The directors of the firm hired to amend the TOS after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked."
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, nice try troll. It was a genuine concern. The clause had the potential to be a huge land grab. It's hard to say whether it was an accident or they really got the message but it's been fixed. It's not the only time it's happened. I seem to remember both Apple and MS trying that sort of thing in the past, it's a bit easier to believe that Google just made a mistake though.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
On the resource side of things, they're going to have to make a significant amount of improvement to be competitive with Firefox on performance. Sure web surfing is apparently faster, but that's against the 3.0 release and neglects the impact of memory hogging and the tweaks coming down the pipe in 3.1.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
So do they... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So do they... (Score:5, Informative)
[so do they] relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
No, they said that this change would be applied retroactively.
...right, and since "retroactively" means [answers.com] "Influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment", that would make the answer yes, not no. How did this get moderated informative?
Parent
You must agree to.... [CLICK] (Score:5, Insightful)
See.... nobody, not even Google themselves ever reads the freakin' legal boilerplate crap you have to click on to install software.
But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But.. (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this modded "Funny"? The code is under a BSD license. You can do exactly that.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no community project out there to provide an EULA-free Chrome fork.
Parent
Re:But.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Heck, I'm surprised there's no community project out there to provide an EULA-free Chrome fork.
2 main reasons. Right now, Chrome is essentially Windows only, and as we know, most people who use Windows don't care about EULAs. And secondly, Chrome isn't used much, right now people are wondering if it is the future or nothing more then a nice experiment, if Chrome stays around then expect Debian to fork it like they did with Mozilla. If it dies, expect a very small fork to continue development of it.
Parent
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Don't be silly (Score:5, Funny)
All this is scaremongering. Your confidential business data, bank account details, personal preferences in pornography, medical records and DNA sequence are strictly a matter between you and Google's marketing department, and no-one else. Remember, they're not evil! [today.com]
Secret Sauce (Score:5, Funny)
1. Loudly complain about annoying features in the beta stage
2. Watch as company removes said features because they're in vulnerable position
3. Rinse and repeat on other products
4. Realize why so many corporations fight for control of the media
5. Start your own local newspaper
6. ?
7. Go out of business because nobody reads newspapers anymore, you moron
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the OP had it right, its just an "outbreak"... saying a sudden outbreak is redundant.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outbreak [merriam-webster.com]
Main Entry:
outbreak
Function:
noun
Date:
1602
1 a: a sudden or violent increase in activity or currency
b: a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease
c: a sudden increase in numbers of a harmful organism and especially an insect within a particular area
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+outbreak [google.com]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outbreak [reference.com]
etc, etc...
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
They took the standard EULA that they use for everything, and slapped it on - it was the easiest thing for the programmers to do at the time, no thought required, just use the standard legal mumbo-jumbo. An understandable mistake, and they've corrected it.
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, that's what a boilerplate is for. For pretty much any other service they have it would have been fine. Or at least in keeping with the competition.
The only reason why it's a problem is because this is one of like two things they're providing where it's not appropriate. Google has a much larger number of projects for which a clause like that is pretty much mandatory to provide the service.
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:5, Informative)
Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER.
As a past member of three corporate legal departments, I'm ROFL at this quote. Most contracts start as boilerplate and only get changed through negotiation between the parties.
Parent