TechWag

Image via Wikipedia Reading the reactions to the TOS (Terms of Service) brouhaha with Chrome, and how Google decided to change it due in part to the massive clamor that happened in the internet, it might be time to revisit the entire idea of a TOS.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an interesting article (and is seeking Diggers to bring it to the front page via Friend Feed) about how the Terms of Service that we agree to when we use Google products means that in some ways, Google has rights to everything we do on their systems.

In relationship to cloud computing and how we will be conducting work, play, and communications on someone else’s system, these Terms of Service become very important. If I am writing the great American novel with my friends using Google Docs, then have I given them a free ride on the book that I am writing with my friends? Imagine my surprise if Google did something with that before I was able to get it published. Google Docs TOS has the same problematic statement (Section 11.1) that the Chrome browser also had.

This is where it gets interesting, if cloud computing is to truly take off and be worthy of respect, it would be not in a company’s best interest to claim the right to reuse anything done on their system. We have to trust the platforms that we work on, we have to know that when we are creating something that it is ours until we sell it, give it away, or it is pirated and generates interest in the file. If Google was to suddenly start using stuff that people created in their Google Docs system (and every document has the same issue right now, section 11.1) then we all lose faith in that system.

Flip this over to the corporate use of Google Documents, or other systems out there with similar problematic Terms of Service statements, then all the corporate documents that we use and build on those systems can also be used by Google for darn near anything they want.

Cloud computing is problematic enough for a company, but when dealing with issues such as copyright, intellectual property, or other concerns that a company and in many cases creative individuals have when making something new, we all have to be aware of what we give up when we use someone else’s system for what we are creating. It would be a misnomer to think that over time these things we create on cloud computing systems will not show up at some point in someone else’s hands, because with the TOS we agreed to, we gave someone else the right to use what we created on their system using their stuff.

Tags: google, terms of service, google docs, chrome, eula, tos, problems