Lazy Ass Google Lawyers: All Your Chrome Files Were Belonged To Us

By Davey Winder
Monday, 08 September 2008 15:11

Strategy

In the mad rush to download and install the Google Chrome browser, who actually read the End User License Agreement before agreeing to it? Thankfully a few people did, and discovered that Google had claimed legal ownership of everything displayed by it. But it is the reason why that really makes you want to spit blood and feathers...

It really did not take long for the doubts about Chrome to start surfacing. Doubts about claims that it is the fastest, smallest and safest web browser client when compared to the big two of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, for example.

It did not take too long for the first privacy concerns to appear either. Although, I have to admit, the manner of this particular Google faux pas took me and a lot of others by surprise.

Previous Google privacy stories have included the search giant admitting there is no such thing as complete online privacy, running into road blocks over Google Street View and the Big Daddy of them all: the YouTube to Viacom data giveaway.

This one, however, was different. This one was a blatant snatch and grab of copyright ownership from everyone.

Of everything! Everything that an end user viewed using the Chrome browser that is.

A clause buried within the EULA stated:

"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."

Whoa! Hold on a minute. Yes, quite, exactly what people said when the clause was highlighted by eagle-eyed legal types.

The response from Google was to change it pretty damn quick after being flooded with complaints.

Even the Google giant knew it wasn't going to get away with this one for long.

OK, so why did Google have this Chrome copyright clause there in the first place? Are any other big names on the Internet doing the same thing? Find out on page 2...

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