I wrote about Google’s Release of Chrome. They have come under a bit of fire from the blog world for their Terms of Service. Remember that thing you skipped over reading while installing Chrome? Well, if you take a closer look you’ll see this:

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. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

To sum it up, Google would own all the rights to pretty much anything you do with the browser.

UPDATE: Google has replied to this. Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, wrote:

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. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.

So, it turns out that not only do end users not read the TOS but the people writing them don’t read them either.

Tags: browsers, Google, rss-applied

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.