I found an interesting discussion going on over at ZDNet in regard to information saved through Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets application. According to ZDNet blogger Joshua Greenbaum, Google has “insidiously” thrown a clause into Docs & Spreadsheets terms of service that give the company the right to use any content uploaded to the service.

The clause in question reads:

… you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services…

Greenbaum, who admits he’s not a lawyer, invites readers to check out the TOS for themselves and form their own opinions. And several people have done just that:

As we state in our terms of service, we don’t claim ownership or control over your content in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, whether you’re using it as an individual or through Google Apps. Read in its entirety, the sentence from our terms of service excerpted in the blog ensures that, for documents you expressly choose to share with others, we have the proper license to display those documents to the selected users and format documents properly for different displays. To be clear, Google will not use your documents beyond the scope that you and you alone control. Your fantasy football spreadsheets are not going to end up shared with the world unless you want them to be. - Writely founder (which became Docs & Spreadsheets)

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There’s a lot of ambiguity in the overall TOS so while others are right to pull other pieces out and you’re right to point to the ownership question, it’s highly confusing whichever way you cut it.

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This whole post is based on what you (incorrectly) perceive to be a sentence structure that says that “public” applies to the apps, not the content? Give me a break. I think you could run that sentence by a hundred people, and not more than one or two would interpret the way you did.

This is made even more clear by the previous two sentences in the TOS:

“Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.”

As Greenbaum points out, when combined, the TOS seem to suggest that, while Google acknowledges that they have no ownership of the content submitted to their services, they do have a right to use that content for various purposes.

One of the criticisms lobbed at many a Google service is the company’s liberal indexing and scanning technology. When it was first announced that Gmail would display advertising contextually based on the content of user’s email messages, a huge outcry went up from privacy advocates. Since then Google hasn’t be quite as vocal about how it uses content uploaded to individual services.

What do you think? Is Google granting itself the right to use your documents and spreadsheets simply by using their service? ZDNet readers and authors have gone as far as to examine the grammatical implications of the wording of the terms of service… but there’s no clear consensus amongst the group.

I’m a little on the fence about this. I can see how the wording could be construed to support what Greenbaum is suggesting. When read together, the entire paragraph from the TOS does seem to suggest that Google isn’t claiming ownership of your content, but DOES claim rights to use it. But at the same time, I’m just not sure that was the intent. As several other users have pointed out, Google could simply be covering it’s own butt when it comes to sharing content flagged by users for public consumption.

Say, for example, that you upload a file and mark it “public”. Anyone and everyone could potentially see that document as long as it remained public. If you later decided that you didn’t want that document to be made public and tried to sue Google, they’d be able to whip out their TOS and point to the clause in question.

I remain undecided as to Google’s intent. What do you think? Do you think the TOS are a sneaky attempt to get their hands on as much content as possible? Are they simply worded in a confusing way? Or are folks way off with this one?

One thing I do know for sure: if you’re concerned about your data… don’t put it on the Internet, plain and simple.

(Via Slashdot )

Update:  Fellow C|Net blogger (and lawyer) Matt Asay has also weighed in on the discussion and is just as troubled by the wording as Greenbaum.  But Valleywag says he got it all wrong.