4 ms·
The problem is that it's not clear the license to "use, create derivatives, etc" is solely for the purpose of providing you access to your data worldwide. Using
by hackinthebochs 15y ago
The problem is that it's not clear the license to "use, create derivatives, etc" is solely for the purpose of providing you access to your data worldwide. Using, say, your vacation photos in an advertisement seems within the scope of the TOS. Google could be clearer if they chose to be. I believe it is intentionally vague.
- eli 15y agoThe rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. That doesn't seem intentionally vague to me. I suppose a restriction on using vacation photos in their ads would be nice... But is that really what people are concerned about? That doesn't seem very likely or threatening.
- hackinthebochs 15y agoPromoting seems problematic to me. What does promoting mean and in what manner will they be promoting their service using data that I upload? A reasonable laymen read of this basically means advertising.
- jeffool 15y agoThe concern is that, say, a musician is in the process of making a new song. Google sees this, and releases the song shortly before the artist releases it themselves, and for free! Now what is the artist to do? The likelihood? Small. But if it happens, you'll have Google befitting from that artist's work, and the artist less able to do so. The artist would have given away his right to sue, possibly unknowingly (because who reads TOS'?!) And of course Google won't pay him. Not because they don't want to, but because they know it'll open the floodgates of similar claims!
- eli 15y agoSeems like something that almost never happens, actually. In the list of ways that copyright can screw musicians, this seems very very far down the list. (and as an aside, you can most definitely sue for copyright infringement no matter what a click-through license says)
- jonknee 15y agoHow would you word it differently? They need to be able to use and create derivatives (thumbnails or cropping images is a "derivative", ditto for encoding a YouTube video). This is the terms for every Google product. If it was changed for line by line detail for every product, it would change so frequently that users could never know what was in it or agree to it. Drive hooks in with a ton of Google services, its policy would likely be hundreds of pages long if it was not "intentionally vague". Dropbox's terms are similar, except to sound like they were not written by a lawyer. > "We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction" Sounds like a license to use and create derivatives to me...
- hackinthebochs 15y agoWhat does promoting mean in this context? A reasonable read of this would basically mean "advertising". I think the dropbox terms are clearer, and not because they weren't written by a lawyer. They were specifically meant to be as clear as possible. Because Google has a global TOS now, they have to be vague enough to encompass all services. But this introduced ambiguity. I never understood their motivation for this. Clarity is preferable to a single TOS that we all know a minuscule amount of people read.