Google Makes Amendments to Chrome EULA

Google has rewritten the EULA for Chrome, the company’s browser that launched in beta earlier this week.

The wording of section 11 of the Chrome Terms of Service raised a few eyebrows among those who actually bothered to read the service agreements before installing the browser. At the time of launch, the agreement stated that by submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services,” which no doubt rings alarm bells for bloggers everywhere.

A Google spokesperson told the BBC that Google reuses the EULAs for a lot of their products and simply didn’t realize that a large part of Chrome Terms of Service would rile up the blogosphere population.

Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel at Google said that the company reuses chunks of Universal Terms of Service for the sake of simplicity and the claims made in the original agreement with Chrome were an oversight. "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," Ward explained.

The edited version of the Chrome EULA now reads as, "You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

Google launched Chrome on Tuesday morning and the fact that it’s Google, not to mention the accidental cat-escapes-bag email sent out couple of days early, it was hardly surprising to see Google headlines almost right across the board. We expected to see people dissecting every aspect of Chrome the minute they could get their hands on it, which makes us wonder how Google could have overlooked something so important.