Yesterday, I joked about how Google Drive’s open nature could put your content in the wrong hands and you could see a malware author publishing your novel. Well, it seems that it’s already in the wrong hands. After someone actually read the licence agreement for Google Drive, people everywhere have been freaking out about the insane rights that Google claims over any content stored on Google Drive: 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).So, once you upload your content to Google Drive, you give it an indefinite licence to publish your work and to provide it to partners for whatever purpose it desires. While that’s probably unlikely and it’s probably just lawyer ass-coverage in case Google should eventually be so insanely inclined, it’s beyond scary, and no one in their right mind should use this service. You could be the next unwilling author on Books.Google.com, and and there wouldn’t have a single thing you could do about it legally. In comparison, the Dropbox and Microsoft Skydrive TOS (terms of service) are clearly different. Dropbox: You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.SkyDrive: Except for material that we licence to you, we don’t claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don’t control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.So, now that we know just how far Google is willing to go with our content, I have one question: Why isn’t Google paying us to use it? Continue Reading

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