Comment by Justin Watt

February 24, 2009 @ 1:18 pm

Joy, that ZDNet post you linked to is almost 2 years out of date, and inaccurate/inflammatory at best—even some of the commentors disagree with the absence of context of that particular excerpt.

I would re-read the terms of service specific to Google Docs:
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/addlterms.html

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a 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 Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.”

I think you can generally rest easy.

Comment by joy

February 24, 2009 @ 1:29 pm

Justin, I actually didn’t mean to link to that article. I meant to link to the terms of service. Anyway, the language you’re bolding is in my post (more or less). Did you read what I wrote? It still seems shifty to me, and doesn’t address the security issue.

Comment by Eric

February 24, 2009 @ 6:09 pm

Those kinds of terms of service need to be in there for Google Docs to do what they do. People using it for shared documents are asking Google to “publish”, “publicly perform” and “publicly display”. Even if you keep your docs private, they’ll need to “reproduce”, “adapt”, “modify” and “distribute”. That’s the nature of a hosted service. The “sole purpose” bit is the powerful bit that means they can only do the things with it you asked them to, they’re just requiring that you not need to understand the details of how that is done behind the scenes.

Also, google docs does have an offline mode where you can edit a doc on your computer without being connected to a network at all (or while google is down) and it syncs up later.

However, the security issue remains. It’ll never be more secure than your password. Or whatever’s involved in password recovery, for that matter. (if it only requires access to an email account you told it about when setting up the google account, then it’s only as secure as the least secure of those two accounts).

Comment by Eric

February 24, 2009 @ 6:12 pm

BTW: real Linux users would be doing this with emacs. Or maybe vim.

Yes, I’m serious. Yes, I’ve done it (or the equivalent) for my resume, cover letters, et cetera.

No, I’m not serious: it’s a terrible option for non-geeks with no support for .doc format and amazingly terrible support for .rtf.

Comment by Joy

February 25, 2009 @ 8:07 am

Eric, I do understand all that. However, when someone else is claiming copyright over your work in some sort of disclaimer, even if they think they have a good reason for it, the bottom line is that it is unwise to trust them with your work. It is a completely unnecessary risk. I’m sure Google wouldn’t re-publish my work, I realize they are doing it because of servers, but I don’t trust it and don’t want to use it. Why should I?

The point of this post is that I’m a writer, not a computer geek, and the whole Google docs thing is one of several options that doesn’t work for me. I am not going to use vim or emacs. I need a real word processor designed for real writers, and I need one without skeezy Terms of Service and major security flaws or holes. But you are welcome to use Google docs all you want.

Comment by Kyle

February 25, 2009 @ 8:30 am

The “sole purpose” clause does appear to be the part that is supposed to protect the individual from Google misusing the work, but like with basically any of these services where one puts their work in another’s hands, it comes down to trust. We are essentially required to trust that Google won’t use these terms to do something an author wouldn’t like, and since most people aren’t going to hire a lawyer ahead of time to review and renegotiate the ToS to suit them (just like they don’t when they see an EULA on software), they are basically left either accepting the terms or using other software (I suppose until other people require you use it to collaborate, etc.).

This trust and having control of one’s content is even more important now that the barriers to publishing are so much lower. You can see that in the backlash Facebook saw to its own ToS change and it’s something we will continue to see as more people use “the cloud” (I hate that term) to store their data. We can already see how a number of companies have misused people’s personal information, privacy clause or not, when they have sold their business. The same thing applies to sites that store a person’s content. As that becomes their main asset, companies will try harder and harder to control it, especially if they are in financial trouble.

Having said all that, I prefer writing in vim

Comment by marcia

February 25, 2009 @ 2:50 pm

I do not have passionate opinions about terms of service or word processing. I do, however, dislike how gmail organizes things. It is annoying to use when there is an email with multiple people on it who all reply. Is that controversial?

Comment by Chris Routledge

March 12, 2009 @ 11:51 am

>wants everything to be in its proprietary .odt format.

Proprietary .odt format? Have you looked into this even a tiny little bit? Proprietary is about the last thing it is. That’s the whole point.

Comment by Joy

March 12, 2009 @ 12:01 pm

Chris, as far as I can tell, you don’t like the word “proprietary” here since OpenOffice is free software. If you take that word out and re-read the sentence, then you will see that my overall point is that the program tries to keep everything in that format and it’s inconvenient for me. Oddly enough, I’m not talking about licensing at all. If you read the whole post, you’ll see I have looked into this quite a bit and tried a lot of different options. But yes, pedantically speaking, it isn’t proprietary. However, the way the software acts, it might as well be.