Gasp! Google Adapts and Modifies Your Docs & Spreadsheets Content?! Yes, But...
CNET columnist Matt Asay asks, provocatively: "does Google own your content?". It's based on a post by ZDNet's Joshua Greenbaum, who picked up on some interesting language in the terms and conditions of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Here's the offending passage:
"Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion."
(emphasis ours)
While Asay implies that this means Google is staking a claim of ownership, it is clearly not doing that - Google's T&C states that copyright belongs to the content owner. Also note that the above passage only applies to content that is made public, so it's not relevant to your private documents.
In the comments to Greenbaum's post, Writely co-founder Sam Schillace clarified:
"As we state in our terms of service, we don't claim ownership or control over your content in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, whether you're using it as an individual or through Google Apps. Read in its entirety, the sentence from our terms of service excerpted in the blog ensures that, for documents you expressly choose to share with others, we have the proper license to display those documents to the selected users and format documents properly for different displays. To be clear, Google will not use your documents beyond the scope that you and you alone control. Your fantasy football spreadsheets are not going to end up shared with the world unless you want them to be."
I'm inclined to accept Schillace's view and I also think Asay's headline is flat out misleading. Nowhere in Google's T&C does Google claim ownership of your content. However the T&C could be misconstrued when it comes to the words "adapt" and "modify". While I'm sure this doesn't involve Google employees taking creative liberties with your public documents (as Schillace implied, it's more about modifying them for mobile and other displays), those words may need to be reviewed.
This is the kind of issue that still makes people nervous or wary about using Web Office - your content after all lives on Google's servers, not your PC. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why 74% of our poll respondants prefer desktop word processing software.
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I think you are misunderstanding. Google has to say this for any and all content you allow them to share with the general public. If you keep the data private and don't allow it to be shared, that part of the terms/service are not applicable; correct?
The important part to pay attention to is "which are intended to be available to the members of the public".
All companies that share user submitted data HAVE to have this in their terms of use. MySpace, Newsvine, Facebook -- they all have it in there. The site itself is a distribution model ... you are essentially giving them the right to display on said site in any manner they deem acceptable. What if they want to do a popularity aggregation page - they can't ask for permission from all users to display their shared data on such a new page now can they?
This whole "OMG, they own my content" topic is so 2003.
Martin, did you read past the headline? That's what I concluded too.
Yeah, sorry about that the direct "you" reference. It seems like these privacy policy/terms of use references seem to pop-up every few months and while most of it is seemingly a scare tactic for interesting reading -- no one really seems to explain the practical "why".
like it
http://www.textypisni32.com/pisni/genesis/index.php
The other reason people like using local software is the perception that it's somehow more stable. I can't count how many times I've been filling out a form, writing an email, or blog post and when I click save/send/post, some connection error or javascript error completely loses my content. Historically, internet connections and web forms have a great deal of inconsistency in their reliability. I don't think people trust the medium completely yet.
The headline was designed to ask the right question. And just because Google doesn't "own" the copyright doesn't mean it can't exercise effective ownership (by doing all the things it says it will do with "public" content, as noted above).
I don't think Google intends to do wrong here, as I said in my post. What I do think is that Google is quite sloppy in not defining "public." Is it "public" if I share it with my company? Maybe. Is it public if I share it with my neighbors? Maybe. Who decides? The content owner, or Google?
Google, obviously, because the content owner has no way in the system to define what is private and what is public.
That was the nub of my quibble. There's far too much legal leeway in the verbiage. It's not a question, then, as to whether Google does evil with my content, but rather whether it could. If I'm a Google attorney (which I'm not, though I am an attorney), I think the answer is "definitely maybe." That's too close to "yes" for my tastes.
Btw, Richard, I think your post is dead-on for anyone thinking rationally. But lawyers don't get paid to think rationally. They get paid to think about loopholes and what-not. I'm with you in thinking that "public" obviously means what we all think it means, and hence there's no cause for great alarm here. But this isn't a question for rational minds. It's a question for lawyers. :-)
I have to agree with Martin Ringlein's comment:
"Google has to say this for any and all content you allow them to share with the general public. If you keep the data private and don't allow it to be shared, that part of the terms/service are not applicable;"
People are looking into this to much on the back of an "anti-Google" post by Joshua Greenbaum in his own words:
"Google is the new evil empire ".
Having used Google since it began and the Docs/Spreadhseets/Talk/Gmail since pre Beta (no I don't work for Google) I have never had an issue with sharing my IP or other info that I decide should be public. i have even searched abstract strings from confidential docs I share on Google Docs and nothing, zip, rien has been published.
As martin rightly points out:
"All companies that share user submitted data HAVE to have this in their terms of use. MySpace, Newsvine, Facebook -- they all have it in there."
personally I accept this post from Mr Greenbaum for what it seems to be:
The mutterings of a guy clearly looking for a conspiracy that doesn't exist hoping to be the ONE that brings google crashing to its knees. Maybe he missed out on a stock option at Google or was refused a job or interview there!
At the end of the day, Google Docs etc is free to use or not - it's the user's choice. If you ain't happy with their T&C don't accept them - go elsewhere.
What if you accidentally clicked 'share' on the wrong item? You just gave Google irrevocable rights to display your selected contented forever? Heh.