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Does Google Own Your Content?
mjasay writes "ZDNet is reporting that Google has a potentially worrisome clause in its User Agreement for Google Apps. Namely, that any content put into the system and 'intended to be available to the members of the public' is free game for Google, reserving the right for Google 'to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google.' Google may not be evil, but giving it these (and other) rights to one's data should be ringing alarm bells in the Google Apps user base."
I think it is meant to mean that if you submit content to Google which you intend to be displayed to the public, you um, give them the right to display it to the public however they choose, which is pretty standard stuff. But I'm not sure it actually does say that.
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RTFArticle Summary. It applies only to public information, not to private communication. Man, it used to be that people didn't RTFA--now they don't even read past the title. :(
Indeed:
m l:
From http://www.google.com/google-d-s/intl/en/terms.ht
Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.
The full paragraph which clearly states that Google does not own your content. Please stop spreading lies.
Your Rights
Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.
Oh noes! Your public domain material will be in the public domain!
Apart from the fact that the material in question does not have to be in the public domain, and that Google's wording doesn't imply that it will become so, the rest of your comment is absolutely right.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why does this keep coming up, again and again, on nearly every site that lest you upload anything? It's not all that complicated to figure out:
Lawyer with little computer expertise learns that uploaded (and copyrighted) stuff is being reproduced and set out, as the user intended, and thinks (and not entirely without cause) "There are copyright implications to that, because we are, technically, making copies of copyrighted material." He writes a FUD memo to management, who read the subject line with glazed eyes (because it's from a lawyer, and therefore, too complicated for them to understand," and they respond with "What do we need to do?" Lawyer, who has no experience whatsoever at dealing with the general public on the internet, writes a TOS that covers this concerns. Management, who have almost as little experience at dealing with the public (rather than shareholders), rubber stamps is.
These things are intended to cover the Google's (or whoever's) ass for doing what they say they're going to do, and what their users tell them to do: store this stuff and offer it up to the web surfing world under the conditions you said you would.
And a quick perusal of Title 17 shows that copyrights cannot be transferred accidentally anyway. If Google (or whoever) tried to use a clause like that to claim they now owned someone else's work for any purpose other than what was intended by the copyright holder, they'd get their faces blown off by any competent lawyer. Such a clause would be found to be unconscionable, and would not meet the requirements for a copyright transfer even if it weren't.
This is nothing new, and no different than any other "OMFG! THIS TOS IS EVIL" story in the last ten years.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yes, but think about this: you uploaded your video to YouTube specifically so it could be shown to others. But showing it to others constitutes a performance of that video by YouTube. Now, if they don't include in the terms something saying you give them the right to perform your video, how are they going to show it to others? They've no right to performance, you didn't give them one, so they can't do the very thing you want them to do with your video. Similarly, if you don't give them the right to present it in a different form, they can't include it on their front page or provide people the ability to embed the video (see any number of blog pages where, instead of a link to YouTube, the blogger embeds the actual video in a playable form). And if you don't give YouTube the right to make copies of your video, they can't make the multiple copies onto their cache and delivery servers at various points on the network close to the destination networks (think how Akamai works).
One can argue the exact wording (I prefer terms that make it explicit that the grant is for the sole purpose of providing content within the Web site and related operations and that uses outside the context of the Web site aren't part of the grant), but copyright law means that YouTube and the like have to ask you for certain rights simply to be able to legally do what you want them to do.
I'm the engineering director for Google Docs (and one of the founders of Writely which became the Word Processor part). The comments here are pretty good for the most part - as has been discussed, this is just about re-posting content users have marked as public. Here's what I wrote on the original story, so you don't have to dig it out.