The confusion centered on a passage advising that anyone uploading or submitting content to Google Drive will be granting Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations, or other changes we make so that your content works better with our services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute such content.”
As those words circulated on the internet, the fears about Google Drive undermining intellectual property rights mounted.
It was troubling enough for The New York Times, the third-largest U.S. newspaper, to send out a note discouraging the roughly 1,000 employees in its newsroom from storing files on Google Drive until there’s a better understanding of the intellectual property issues and how the service works.
The uproar might have died down if more attention had been paid to a straightforward statement leading up to the paragraph that set off the alarms.
“Some of our services allow you to submit content,” Google says in its disclosure. “You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.”
Another fine point was largely glossed over in the fuss over Google Drive. The same terms have applied to dozens of other Google services, including Gmail, since March 1.
Documents and photos frequently are sent as eMail attachments and stored on Gmail, yet there hadn’t been any major concerns raised about that material becoming Google’s intellectual property.
The passage granting Google licensing rights to content transferred or stored on its services is fairly common among internet services, McSherry said. The licensing requirements are “an artifact of copyright laws that no longer work in our modern world, rather than any evil intent on Google’s part.”
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