Who Owns You? Google Owns You
Thinking of uploading your stuff to the new Google Drive? First, you might want to read from their terms and conditions:
Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).
Don’t be evil!
More seriously, I expect an uproar big and loud and sustained enough to force Google to back off and — like Dropbox and Sky Drive — let you keep your own rights to your own stuff.
Or, just keep being evil.
UPDATE: It might not be quite so evil as it first appeared. We have this from CNET:
That means that Google can’t use your content for commercial purposes without your consent. However, the TOS also states that, “you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.”
For content that is yours, Google can’t re-use it for its own purposes. But it can use content you upload in order to serve you. This can include integrating services together (like reading your scanned pictures in order to OCR them), and it can include analyzing your files to target advertisements to you. Google already does this in GMail. Google doesn’t currently serve ads in Google Docs (now called Google Drive), but it may, according to its license agreement, use data about the content you upload to target ads to you anywhere on the service.
So Google can’t sell you, but it will use your files to help selling to you.
This is why I have a big hard drive.
If you need to store info, write it on clay tablets and bake the clay. This is good for about 5000 years, longer if you don’t drop the tablets.
Yet another reason to tell Google to go to hell.
Off topic, but happy birthday! When do the birthday martinis start?
I’m an insurance attorney and general litigator, not an IP lawyer, and odds are good that I’m not licensed to practice in your state. And this comment doesn’t serve as a formal legal opinion.
But with those caveats said, I don’t think that CNET has this right. Just because you retain the rights doesn’t mean that Google can’t use the material for its own purposes.
You’ve given them a LICENSE — “for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.” In IP, a license is a serious thing.
That means Google can use your stuff for commercials, market research, R&D, etc. That means some guy at Google can sit down and read all of your stuff to find out what other services you might like, then can develop a service that uses your stuff as an exemplar, then can broadcast your stuff all over the world as part of an ad campaign for their new service that they developed using your stuff.
I haven’t read the entire TOS, and unless someone pays me to, I don’t plan on it. So it’s entirely possible that there are some privacy disclaimers in there that would prevent this. Some of the activity I described might actually be illegal under the DMCA or some other statute; this isn’t my field. But based JUST on the license language, what I described could certainly happen, even though you “retain ownership” of your stuff.
Yeah. “The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.”
Anything you upload to Google, they can use in an ad campaign. The “to develop new ones [services]” is nebulous. Does it mean that they can only use your files in the laboratory to create new services, or does it mean that if they develop a new service they can use your files in furtherance of that service?
Suffice it to say, I’m not using Goggle Drive.
Yes, precisely. Based just on the above quotes, for example, I’d guess that it would take a court case to determine whether using Google Docs counts as a “disclosure” for the purposes of filing a patent. I also would have doubts about putting anything on there that is covered under an NDA.
Issues like these are why I don’t let Google anywhere near my stuff.
And like any other TOS, (and I’m looking at you, Facebook) Google can change it at any time to suit its purposes.
But I wonder, what kind of Ads will Google try to send me if I just upload the darn thing full of Indonesian Porn?
All your base almost belong to Google.