By way of follow-up to one of my previous posts on Google's terms and conditions, Google are in the news again, but this time in relation to the ts and cs which apply to its new Web-browser entitled Chrome.
The original terms and conditions apparently gave Google rights to an all singing worldwide perpetual licence to effectively reproduce and do anything else with any Content displayed on or through its Services. This would have arguably covered any documents created through use of Chrome which could have been extremely wide. The current ts and cs state that users will retain all rights in their Content and Google do not acquire any rights at all.
The interesting thing about this news story is that the excuse was that this was just a 'drafting error' resulting from the fact that Google aim to use consistent wording across all of their terms and conditions to make things simple for users (see blog post from Matt Cutts which includes a quote from Google Senior Product counsel Rebecca Ward). It seems likely that public pressure may have given rise to this about-turn.
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