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Google Claims User Content In Multiple Products
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."
... including its Picasa photo service ...
You mean they own my bestiality pics?
And my death threats?
... and they aren't even going to be from me!
Man, they are going to have some serious legal issues
My work here is dung.
Google's official explanation to why it was in Chrome was "Ah, it was left there as remains from our other services. Sorry, we'll remove it from that one.
And a week later, Slashdot realizes that it actually is in Google's other services.
I will. If you don't grant them a license to your photos when you upload them to Picasa, they can't legally display them on the service without infringing your copyright.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
It's not a story. It's stupid fearmongering perpetuated by blazing fuckwits who like to hop on the hate bandwagon.
These kinds of terms are necessary for services where copyrighted material is hosted. Otherwise, they don't have permission to serve your content to other users, which is the whole point of the service.
From Slashdot's terms of use :
Everybody who thinks this is some kind of evil scheme by Google to rob content should now leave Slashdot, for they are doing exactly the same thing.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I wish I could mod you above 5 points.
Those terms are REQUIRED for Google to be able to display your content.
Let's examine them carefully, eh?
"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."
So, what exactly are we giving Google here?
Basically, it's a license to display the content. Hey, they sorta need that if I'm uploading photos for the purpose of them actually displaying it on the internet.
They have a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license". Meaning that they can display those pictures without paying me for them, worldwide, forever. Okay, the irrevocable part sucks, because if I take the content offline, I'd like it to be actually taken offline, but that's a minor legal thing that's probably there because they can't guarantee that what with their caching schemes and such.
They can "reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute". Reproduction is required in order to publish/perform/display/distribute the photos. Adapt, modify, translate applies to resizing, cropping, that sort of thing.
This is a non-story, people. They are not taking the copyright away, they are asking for the legal ability to do *what you want them to actually do*. Which is basically to host your content.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The rights do stay with the uploader. But Google needs a license from the uploader to display the material at all - and that's the purpose of the relevant segment of the TOS. As for promotional images, it'd make sense that they can take screenshots and etc of their service, no? If you want a service that promises never to commercialize your content ever, you should be paying for it. And the promotional rights terminate as well "within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed"
I'm not sure that kind of legalese is supposed to make sense. It's supposed to give all rights on the most possible content to the company who commissioned the writing of the ToS, whether that's enforceable or no.
My attitude is "fuck that, I'll do what the hell I want with any content that interests me and I'm too poor to be sued out of billions."
I know the standard answers to that, yes. I'm irresponsible, stupid, yadda yadda, living in a dream world where companies won't try to force me out of billions I'll never ever have a snowflake's chance in Hell to own - look at it this way : If I ever write some music or draw some piece that $EVIL_CORP steals and make billions off of, well, I couldn't have dreamt of marketing it that well.
Case in point : innovation in chocolates. I work in a small chocolate factory, we have five range of highly varied products, most of which are true innovations, as in "never been done before". And yesterday, browsing teh intartubez, I found an other, much more recent firm, that markets their products really, really well (that is, "much better than we even dream of"), based on ideas that are ALL in our production for at least several years, and much better done. (A champagne praline? How cliché. Try Marc de Champagne. A cognac praline? Come on, use Armagnac instead!). .be, and the other would entail launching our sixth range of products), but we just silently included in our normal ranges.
I suppose that, in the US, we could sue them into oblivion [if we could afford better lawyers than theirs], but we (me & my boss) just shrugged and admired the superior craftmanship of their pralines. (They're Japanese and thus can afford to produce very pretty designs that would have insanely prohibitive labour costs here in Belgium.)
And we kind of laughed to see that they were spinning their marketing around ideas we had thought of years prior (save two innovations of theirs, of which one would be insanely pricey to make here in
My point is, innovation is easy. I, for one, have ideas all the time. What about a matrix of, say, chocolate truffles made from various chocolate origins flavoured with various coffee origins? I found that one six months ago, can't wait to see someone implement it. (_We_ would do it better anyway, because we're only ever buying the best quality available in the world - that's our most basic design principle.)
Ideas are cheap. Better : they're free. And they want to be free. They're information.
But if you want to make money, you have to implement them, which is an investment, and, most importantly, market them.
How much money you make is directly proportional to how good your marketing is.
Now back on topic. If I ever produce digitizable content, that is, content that can be produced for an up-front cost and then be copied and distributed for a cost of zero, I still have to market it, no matter how good it is, or how much market penetration it can have (if I write, say, "psychedelic jazz/doom-metal for oboe and electric harp plus a violin", its penetration in the music market will be very near zero no matter how good it is). And if $EVIL_CORP steals my content, decides it will be the Next Big Thing and puts it up on heavy rotation on MTV, then they're marketing it much better than I can dream to ever do.
Now, who deserves the money? Me, or $EVIL_CORP? I'd say it's them, not me. It may be that without me there wouldn't be content, but without them, there would be no awareness of its existence. And THAT is why the companies in the RIAA don't pay their artists : they're very aware that THEY are making the MONEY. They know thhey are not making the content. And yes, no matter how much it hurts the artists' feelings, the "content of the content" does not matter - it really is work for hire. Morally ass-backwards? Yes. But that's how it works. I'm not saying that history justifies them, it's a totally different argument. I'm saying that the content itself -basically information- is worthless in dol
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.