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Google Updates The Chrome End User Licensing Agreement

In response to the brouhaha that ensued when people began to read Chrome's crazy terms of service, Google has amended them. Google now no longer retains the rights to own anything you do when using Chrome. Whew. Legal quagmire avoided.

Clause number 11 in Chrome's original terms of service basically read that Google owned anything you created or did when using Chrome. Obviously, that's ridiculous. As expected, an uproar ensued.

Google quickly issued an "our bad" and said it would make some much-needed edits to its terms of service. It issued this reasoning for the mistake in a recent post to The Official Google Blog, "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. 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."

The updated version of Clause 11 now reads, "11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post, or display on or through, the Services."

Google says that the change is retroactive and will apply to all and any content created or consumed by all Chrome users from the time of first download and install.

Boy, am I relieved.

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