Google Claims User Content In Multiple Products 166
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."
and for anyone who thinks... (Score:1, Interesting)
And for anyone who thinks Google would never do anything bad with the power they've given themselves, I offer a contract in which I give you a free cake once a week and you let me use your house as I please as long as I don't get in your physical way. It's yours, but I may do what I like in rooms you're not currently using.
FWIW I've not cooperated with the Chinese govt on censorship, nor given paid partner status to the Church of Scientology on any of my subsidiary companies, nor yapped on about reducing the carbon footprint while buying a 767. I'm a sole trader so I don't have a board of directors with any members under investigation for stock fraud related to my company. I hope this gives me a better anti-hypocrisy track record than your dearly beloved.
Best,
AC.
Re:Not a story (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Yes, I understand the need for the clause to allow the site to function as intented but on the other hand I do have a problem when there is a free for all grab of ALL user content which can be used for ANY purpose. If the site is a photo-sharing site then the TOS should only try to retain a license to display images and maybe text, etc.
As to the promotional aspect I think it is lame of them to say they need the rights to all user content. Just have an employee make an account for promotional purposes, problem solved. If a user has a page that is really out of the ordinary and would work for promotional purposes then ASK THEM for permission, if the site is free they probably will allow usage of the content and if not oh well.
Google specifically states in the UTOS a license to use user content for promotional purposes in section 11.1 and that is my biggest gripe:
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence 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 licence 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.
State what you need to state in the TOS to let the site FUNCTION, but adding in extra rights by default in order to get free promotional material among other uses is BS.
Re:Not a story (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Uh Oh! (Score:2, Interesting)