Good Job, Google

On Thursday, Episode 11 of the Geocentric podcast mentioned the first negative aspect we'd heard about Google's new browser, Chrome. That point in particular was related to the EULA, or more simply, the browser's "terms of service." Momentarily I'll give a brief explanation of what the problem was but for now I would like to announce that apparently Google has remedied the problem. I bring you this announcement from the gadgets related blog of Matt Cutts.

So here's what happened: Originally, there was a portion of section 11 in the EULA stating that by doing anything through the Chrome browser, you would 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.” In other words, if you do it through Chrome, Google owns it. Those of us who were aware of this were irritated to say the least.

To their credit however, Google has officially changed this section to the following:

"You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

Much better. Of course the original wording of the EULA was rather confusing to those who understand the history of Google, not to mention that such a rights claim seems odd in connection with an open source product. So to help us understand what happened, Google released the following explanation:

“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 basically, it was a case of bad cutting and pasting. Well, I suppose you can't expect perfection from anyone, even Google. However, those of us who are just waiting for Google to become that which it hates can breathe a sigh of relief... at least for now.