Google apologises over Chrome blunder

 

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Posted on 8 Sep 2008 at 14:10

Google has apologised for burying a clause in the licence of its new Chrome web browser. The clause would effectively give the search giant ownership of any material displayed by the application. The company apologised, claiming the fault was due to a careless use of "copy and paste" in its terms and conditions.

Mike Yang, Google's senior product counsel, admitted that the firm had made a blunder with the browser's terms and conditions. He stressed that it was never Google's intention to take away Chrome users'
copyright of their own files.

"Whenever we release a product in beta as we just did with Google Chrome, we can always count on our users to come up with ways to improve it," said Yang. "This week's example: several eagle-eyed users and bloggers have expressed concern that Section 11 of Google Chrome's terms of service attempts to give us rights to any user-generated content "submitted, posted or displayed on or through" the browser."

The clause, which applies to all of Google's services, stipulates that Google has a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence" to reproduce or adapt user's content.

"You'll notice if you look at our other products that many of them are governed by Section 11 of our Universal Terms of Service," explained Yang. "This section is included because, under copyright law, Google needs what's called a "license" to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog's content. The same goes for any other service where users can create content. But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service. In Gmail, for example, the terms specifically disclaim our ownership right to Gmail content."

Yang went on to stress that, for Google Chrome, only the first sentence of Section 11 should have applied to the licence agreement. The Google executive apologised for the oversight and said the Google Chrome terms and conditions have been updated.

Author: Robert Jaques