We just read this about the Google Chrome EULA.  It seems Google may claim strong rights to everything you create through or with its browser.

I’m not sure the law has really caught up with the Internet yet.  How could Google enforce this?  When would it?  Would courts go along for the ride?  Are browsers and other free products of this kind a type of “public accommodation” or other necessity of life in the 21st century that might remove them from typical User Agreement legal territory?

We’re seeing EULAs and territorial claims like Chrome’s more and more often.  There are lots of companies with strong User Agreements that either give enormous rights to the companies themselves or deny rights to the users or otherwise require or forbid certain behaviors from their users.  I’d guess that most of the most famous companies on the web have some kind of user-connected provision or another that might fall into one of these categories.

What the companies end up doing with these provisions is another matter.  Often they don’t do much to enforce, at least to date.  But it’s hard to tell which is, well, more Orwellian: the fact that these provisions exist, or the fact that the companies’ behaviors are so radically different from the words that they mouth.  It’s like the lawyers are charged with quietly making as much of a land-grab as possible while the companies go about their business without calling on the provisions to take any action.  Law enforcement is finally starting to take notice.  New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram has investigated one company for allegedly failing to live up to its own statements about what user behavior is and isn’t tolerated on its website.

The law has yet to catch up with the web.  We’ll keep watching.  Meanwhile, we’ll keep watching your back.  Out here on the Internet, everybody’s gotta have a personal posse for backup, in case the big boys start to abuse their EULAs.