Who owns your google docs

The confusion centered on a passage advising that anyone uploading or submitting content to Google Drive will be granting Google "a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services , communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

As those words circulated on the Internet, the fears about Google Drive undermining intellectual property rights mounted. The uproar might have died down if more attention had been paid to a straightforward statement leading up to the paragraph that set off the alarms. In short, what belongs to you stays yours. The same terms have applied to dozens of other Google services, including Gmail, since March 1.

Documents and photo are frequently sent as email attachments and stored on Gmail, yet there. The passage granting Google licensing rights to content transferred or stored on its services is fairly common among Internet services, McSherry said.

These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below. Microsoft's SkyDrive -- terms can be found here :. Your Content: Except for material that we license to you, we don't claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don't control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.

Google Drive -- terms can be found here :. The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps.

The last sentence makes all the difference. The privacy settings of your files depends on the folder or drive they are in. Files in your individual drive are private, until you decide to share them. You can share your content and can transfer control of your content to other users.

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