Anyone heard of email or a telephone?
About half an hour ago, I was forwarded a link to an item on News.com's News blog, where Matt Asay asked an important question related to Google Apps, "Does Google own your content?" after seeing this post by Joshua Greenbaum on ZDNet's Enterprise Anti-matter blog.
He's commenting as a lawyer, and is going to have a much more solid understanding than most of us probably would, and it definitely looks grim. That being said, this comment by someone identifying himself as one of the people behind Writely clarifies that the way it's worded is done so that the ability for you to forward your information to a third party for review and editing. Also, this person discussing how the grammar in the TOS is used is probably just confusing for the average reader.
We could go on all day about this discussion, but what I wanted to point out here was how Google managed to get slapped around in two pretty big headlines, and these items have probably been passed around quite a bit, and it doesn't appear that anyone has actually contacted Google PR or the folks behind Apps directly. This is still, unfortunately, one of the things that drives me batty about the posts that go flying up on blogs without a thought to ask someone what the issue is. Even if you are going to post, send an email at the same time, let the PR person (or whomever you're reaching out to) know you're posting something, and say that in your post. Instead, we get a ton of pot-stirring.
Whether this is or isn't an issue for users of Google Apps isn't even the big thing here in this case, it's that no one's taken the time to contact Google directly about it. So, we'll be doing so this afternoon, and will post an update accordingly.
Comments
Tom,
Thanks for the interest in my post regarding Google Apps. Let me comment on why PR wasn't contacted: after 20+ years in the industry, I see no reason to seek PR's spin on something as obvious as the language in their terms of use. PR would certainly spin this, and that's their job. But their spin would be just that, spin. If you were in corporate PR, would you answer such a query honestly -- as in, yes it's true, we are claiming rights to your content. That kind of honesty never happens.
So, instead of waiting and subjecting myself to PR blah-blah, I wrote the post. Because the big thing in this issue is precisely the problem with the language in their terms of use. This content land grab probably violates privacy laws in Europe and elsewhere, and absolutely violates any reasonable corporate data security policy. These are huge issues. The fact that PR didn't get an opportunity for spinning is completely insignificant by comparison.
Posted by: Joshua Greenbaum | August 29, 2007 04:43 PM