Google restores Chrome's shine

Polishes up its EULA

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in Law, 4th September 2008 08:12 GMT

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Google has acted with speed and retracted the objectional sentences in Chrome's EULA, so that any content you post via Chrome is yours and yours alone.

The ruckus was caused by our old friends, the paralegal firm Cut 'n' Paste Inc. Their employment has now been terminated and a new contract arranged with Fink First, Cut 'n' Paste who have produced a revised section 11 reading:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

There are no qualifying sub-sections at all.

So why did this happen?

Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, wrote:

In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. 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.
We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.

Googler Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, blogged:

It was clearly a mistake on Google’s part to include that language when it shouldn’t have been there, and I should have been grateful to the people that pointed it out. Instead of getting snippy with people, my reaction should have been more along the lines of “Oh crap, I don’t think that’s intentional. Thank you so much for noticing that and pointing it out. I’ll see if we can get an official clarification or reaction as soon as possible.”
I apologize for that, and I appreciate the people who push Google to be better.

Thaddeus P Fink, founder, chairman and CEO of Fink First, Cut 'n Paste, said he had a one-time-only, special offer deal for cutting out Completely Redundant Arcane Prose (think acronymically) from EULAs, and was open for further business. ®

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