Chrome's EULA ridiculous - grants Google license to all the content you submit

This is similar to the situation where, for at least a little while, the EULA for Safari on Windows only allowed its use on 'Apple-labeled' computers.<p>I find it oddly reassuring that companies don't pay any more attention to EULAs than users.

A new EULA has been posted...<p><a href="http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html</a><p>11. Content license from you<p>11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

For open source software the clause I found most odd was "10.2 You may not (and you may not permit anyone else to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, reverse engineer, decompile or otherwise attempt to extract the source code of the Software or any part thereof, unless this is expressly permitted or required by law, or unless you have been specifically told that you may do so by Google, in writing."<p>The incompatibility of this is covered by clause 1.2, ". . . Open source software licences for Google Chrome source code constitute separate written agreements. To the limited extent that the open source software licences expressly supersede these Universal Terms, the open source licences govern your agreement with Google . . ."<p>It's still odd though.

sometimes i wonder if the executives ever read their own legal documents. i read every legal document i sign or agree to, because to not do so opens up risk. but before they're released, legal documents should be vetted by a number of people in the company, especially those who are technically inclined. it often feels like many legal docs, terms of use documents, aup's and what not are written by lawyers who really don't understand the essence of what they're doing.<p>and clearly, there is a class of lawyer who's testing the boundaries of intellectual property law. too little of this has been challenged and brought to court.

Perhaps the dumbest thing of all is bloggers don't actually read up before posting blogs like this particular one. One of the developers debunked the idea, he listed when the browser communicates with Google ( here: <a href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/</a> ), and he insisted that they hold no rights in a public blog post that can be cited by any two-bit lawyer from the way-back-machine. Scandalous of them, huh?

That's about as enforceable as signing away your first-born.

My greatest surprise in all this is that people actually read EULAs.

The official line right now is that the legal team at Google is aware of the situation and is taking a look.<p>Yay legal!

Settle down. It appears they just used the default EULA that comes with all their "Services". They have since realized that they need a different EULA. You'll probably see a new (retroactive) Chrome EULA come out shortly.

These are the universal terms of service that apply to all Google products: <a href="http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS</a>. It's entirely reasonable given that it limits what they can use and it protects them against, say, Pepsi uploading a document on Google Docs then suing Google for hosting that document.

Let's release Lawrence Lessig on these guys. That guy knows what it really means to "do no evil"