Google amends Chrome licence after objections

Google will dump a section of the licensing agreement for its new Chrome browser after some internet users objected to its copyright implications.
Google said last week it would dump one section of the end-user licensing agreement that gave the company "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" the new browser. Several web users raised copyright and privacy concerns about portions of the licensing agreement shortly after Google launched Chrome. Some critics suggested the language would allow Google to use any web content displayed in Chrome without getting copyright permission.Google said it borrowed language from other products, "in order to keep things simple for our users", when it inserted the copyright provision in the Chrome licence. "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," Rebecca Ward, senior product counsel for Chrome, said in a statement. "We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."In addition to the perpetual copyright granted to Google in section 11, the licence allowed the company to "make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services."That language comes from Google's universal terms of service], the company said.The wording lead to a copyright debate on Slashdot.org, although one poster noted that Slashdot's parent company, SourceForge, uses similar language in some licence agreements. Florida lawyer David Loschiavo dissected the Google licensing agreement in his own blog post."In other words, by posting anything (via Chrome) to your blog(s), any forum, video site, myspace, itunes, or any other site that might happen to be supporting you, Google can use your work without paying you a dime," Loschiavo wrote."It applies to everything you pass through Chrome. Google can take your submitted content and edit and reuse it all they want, as long as they do so in connection with Chrome."The licence agreement seemed to assume that web users had ownership of all the content they produced and displayed through Chrome, he added. Employees of web publishers or universities probably couldn't legally agree to the Chrome terms of service, "because these people most likely don't have the right to give a license to the intellectual property (IP) they produce," Loschiavo wrote. "Most likely your employee or student agreement requires that your employer/university exclusively owns all IP that you make during your time there."Web content creators, such as news writers and musicians employed by a company, may have been in breach of their employment contracts had they agreed to the Google license, he said. "Further, you probably can't use your company or school email with Chrome, because your company probably exclusively owns your email, and you can't give away a license to something you don't own," Loschiavo wrote. "You also can't make representations to Google that you have the power to license this IP if you don't."Other companies have attempted to use similar language in web-based products, including Microsoft and AOL for their instant messaging products, Loschiavo says. Those attempts raised objections as well, he says.

Google's Chrome Officially Enters the Browser Wars

Google on Tuesday released the beta version of its new open-source Chrome Web browser. The 7-Mbyte download is available now via: http://www.google.com/chrome/ in 122 countries and 43 languages. It will run on Windows-based computers running XP or Vista, but Mac and Linux versions are still in the works.
News over Chrome broke Monday after Google inadvertently published a Web comic book with details about the browser.
"What we wanted to build was not so much a traditional content viewer but more of a window manager for web pages and applications," Ben Goodger, a Google software engineer, said during a Tuesday press conference.
Will Chrome encroach on Internet Explorer territory? Google officials took pains to not even mention Microsoft's name during Tuesday's press event, though Google co-founder Sergey Brin did acknowledge when questioned that if "IE9 was much, much better as a consequence of Chrome, we would consider that a success."
Larry Page, Google's other co-founder, dismissed the idea that Chrome was a reaction to IE8. "We started this two years ago," he said. "I think having a world in which the main sort of code that you're using is open-sourced and people can improve it and there's a healthy eco-system, I think, is very important."
When asked how Google will compete against IE, Page demurred. "We're competing with a product that's given away by default on most computers," he said.
Chrome alone will not be a major moneymaker for Google, according to the executives, but if Chrome can improve the user experience, that will encourage more Internet use and ultimately create more revenue for Google, they said.

"If we make our site faster by 20 percent, we can get substantially more usage and that generate directly into revenues," Page said.
But where does that leave Mozilla and its open-source Firefox browser? Mozilla and Google have coordinated on several projects and the two companies recently extended their economic partnership until at least 2011.
Rather than crush Firefox, Chrome could actually help its expansion, suggested Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google.
"Our hope is that by adding our voice, we expand the overall pie," Pichai said. "Our hope is that by adding our voice, more people realize there is a choice" in browsers.
"Firefox market share has been anything but static," Page said. "It has been increasing like crazy."
So why not continue collaborating with Mozilla?
"We did not want to impose our views on anyone else," Pichai said.
In a Tuesday morning blog post, Mozilla chief executive John Lilly wrote that Chrome's release will not significantly affect Mozilla's relationship with Google.
"Mozilla and Google have always been different organizations, with different missions, reasons for existing, and ways of doing things," he wrote.
Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, wrote in a separate blog post that Chrome will validate "once again the central idea that this tool we call the browser is fundamentally important.
Sheri McLeish, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that Chrome's initial impact will be "negligible" with the tech-savvy, students, and small businesses the browser's most likely early adopters.
But Google's incentive for releasing Chrome is not to become the dominant browser provider, but to "take away the desktop ownership from Microsoft," McLeish said. "It's not a play into the browser market, but a building block for Google's other tools and services."
Mozilla should be worried about Chrome, which could see itself folded into the Google browser in future, she suggested. "I think that what we will see is that Google will be able to take advantage of the 20 percent market share Firefox has gained."
Source: pcmag.com

Google Chrome

Google Chrome, the newest browser by google has been launched (as most of you guys know). It’s looking good, no doubt but It’s still not fully functional with all those bugs and issues that even the developers know.

First of all, some of the Known Issues that users have already submitted

- Spreadsheets - When you click in one cell, it sometimes focuses on another cell above it.
- Docs - Comments don’t work as expected
- Calendar - The day is scrolled up to midnight after you edit an event
- Calendar - If you create an all day event between Friday and Sunday, the event will be one day longer than intended.
- Docs - ‘Also editing now’ message redraws multiple times when you scroll
- The English (US) dictionary is installed by default for all languages
- ‘Find in page’ sometimes fails to find entries on very long pages and in editable text areas
- Sometimes your Laptop won’t go to sleep when Google Chrome is running
- Error responses from some proxies are truncated
- Google Chrome doesn’t honor the ‘bypass proxies for these addresses’ list in the Windows’

Internet Options control panel
- Performing searches take a long time, and I see “Resolving proxy…” in the lower-left of the window
- When you open an RSS feed or xml file, it only shows the raw XML data

I downloaded Google chrome, opened couple of sites and then went to check google adsense, to my surprise I confronted this and upon some investigation I found out that Google Chrome does not support SSL client authentication.