Google Alters Chrome License

Google has altered the text of the Chrome browser End User License Agreement, taking out an article that gave it rights over any posted content.

How many people actually read those End User License Agreements (EULA) anyway? Most of us just click on agree so we can get on with the download and the installation. So what you might not have noticed when you downloaded the new Chrome browser from Google is the fact that you gave the company rights over "any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" the browser.

That was on Tuesday.

A day later they’d changed that agreement to make sure the rights remained with Chrome users.

It was, Google claims, an oversight because they’d recycled the EULA. Rebecca Ward, senior product counsel for Google Chrome, said they tend to re-use large chunks of User Agreements.

"Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product," she said.

That’s probably true in this case: the original EULA demanded "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

Now that’s changed to read that users "retain copyright and any other rights" on their own content.