Will Google Finally Make Us Read ToS and EULA?

It really looks now that Google’s shiny Chrome browser was not actually 100% ready for public debut yesterday and the comic book describing the browser Google was working on was sent prematurely. What I see as an evidence of this is that Chrome’s EULA (end-user license agreement) seemed to be far from appropriate for a browser and resembled a standard document describing terms of use of any web service already offered by Google.

Yes, everyone knows that people hardly ever read ToS or EULA - after all, they are too long for anyone to keep focused on them without falling asleep and are written in a language far from easily understandable to anyone without a few years of legal education. Besides, when we wait for a whole day after the information is leaked to the blogosphere for the download link to go live, it is obvious that the anticipation dictates that we start the download without wasting any more time for something as stupid as reading ToS.

But unfortunately for Google some bloggers thought better about it and copied the text of the agreement for later reading. And those bloggers soon started to report that some things contained in Chrome’s EULA (especially in section 11) were at the very least worrisome with Google receiving the rights to do anything it chooses with any content we transfer to the WWW via Google’s browser. And of course when people started reading the document they could not help but notice very inappropriate terms in the license.

But to our relief today Ars Technica reports that Google has admitted the current EULA is a mistake and will be corrected. Nate Anderson writes specifically:

Google’s Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, now tells Ars Technica that the company tries to reuse these licenses as much as possible, “in order to keep things simple for our users.” Ward admits that sometimes “this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product” and says that Google is “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.”

I’m not sure if reuse of licenses is actually intended to keep things simple for users as the majority of web population don’t read them while those that read could only benefit from some diversity in language not to fall asleep over them. But it obviously makes sense to reuse licenses in new products to keep things simple for the corporation and its lawyers - but reuse should mean using previous documents as templates and modifying them to reflect what every new service should actually have user agree upon.

Unfortunately this has not been the case for Google and no matter how much they must have hoped no one would read the document, users still started complaining about it. And Google acted pretty fast to address the concerns of the users as CNET reports the EULA was changed before 2 p.m. today to remove the disputable text from it:

But anyway there are a couple of lessons to learn here and both are pretty simple:

Lesson 1 - for a company

If you are a company that tends to get attention from the blogosphere, you should keep in mind that while users will likely excuse some of the flaws in the product or service launched with a beta tag, they will actually bother to read ToS in some cases and problems terms may result in problems for you.

Lesson 2 - for an internet user

It does not hurt to read ToS - from time to time at least. And while theyse documents may consume tons of your time, if everyone ignores obvious discrepancies in the agreements, the company will end up having users agree to something they actually should not. And this case is a perfect example of how blogosphere buzz about this can make the corporation change the documents to make them more reasonable.