clutter

nolagrrlnyc:

world-shaker:

The most damning information here:

Dropbox — terms can be found here:

“Your Stuff & Your Privacy: By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. 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.”

Google Drive — terms can be found here:

“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

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).”

I know most people just skim past TOS but sometimes you might want to take a moment and read them.

These two quotes actually say the same thing. It’s just that the part where Dropbox enumerates what rights they need to provide the service is cut out of the quote, and included in Google’s. 

In order to operate a service in which your files are hosted remotely in order for you to gain access to them from anywhere in the world, the company providing the service actually DOES have to do things that are legally considered creating derivative works, public performance, reproduction, etc. 

For example, you can’t run a redundant, always-availabe service like Dropbox without copying the files uploaded to it across multiple redundant servers, to say nothing of backups. Making it available via the Internet? That’s public performance. Compressing/optimizing the bits you upload to make them faster to deliver? Legally, that’s a derivative work.

The real, substantial difference is that since Google runs a whole raft of services, what’s covered under the umbrella of “for the purpose of providing the services” is a lot broader than it is with Dropbox, which really only does one thing.