Google has amended Chrome's Terms of Service (ToS), after facing numerous objections from users. Seemingly, a clause in the ToS contract that shipped with Chrome specified in legal terms that whoever was using it was also giving Google the right to use all intellectual property that they passed through the browser.
The news that Chrome's ToS included such a ridiculous clause and, even more, that everyone who used the browser without bothering to read the document first gave Google a license to use their intellectual property, created quite a stir on the web yesterday.
The original agreement made it clear at paragraph 11.1 that “by submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.” The “Services” were defined at the beginning of the document as collectively representing “Google's products, software, services and web sites,” which, obviously, also included Google Chrome.
Florida Attorney David Loschiavo, who specializes in intellectual property law, examined the agreement and
wrote on his blog that “in other words, by posting anything (via Chrome) to your blog(s), any forum, video site, myspace, itunes, or any other site that might happen to be supporting you, Google can use your work without paying you a dime.”
He continued by pointing out that not only would people have given Google the right to use their creations, but a lot of them might have even breached their work contract if they used Chrome on the job, because some of the data they handled with might not be their intellectual property. If that's the case, these people also breached the Google Chrome agreement since paragraph 11.4 states that “You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.”
Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, Rebecca Ward, responded to the accusations and explained that “in order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service.”
The change did occur and, now, section 11 of the
Chrome ToS only has one paragraph which reads: “11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.“ Ms. Ward also pointed out that “this change [would] apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome,” which means that Google would not enforce the original version of the agreement that people accepted without reading.
Mr. Loschiavo also noted that Microsoft pulled a similar legal stunt years ago with MSN Messenger's agreement, which prompted the users to revolt. More recently, AOL did the same with its messaging application (AIM).
