The Interwebs have been abuzz the last 24 hours with news Google’s new web browser, Chrome.

As the blurb about it says, this is a fundamental new approach to writing web browser software which takes into account the modern way people use the web; increasingly websites are not just glorified sales brochures, and indeed web 2.0 is much more than just blogs and social networking – on the modern web, people are actually doing stuff; many websites now are full-featured applications, computer programmes, which traditionally would have been stand-alone software sitting on the user’s own computer rather than on a remote server on the other side of the world. As Google explains, by fundamentally starting again from scratch in the way the browser is coded they hope to avoid many of the problems of stability and memory leak which besets complex web applications on current browsers.

On cursory glances, especially bearing in mind it has only just entered public beta and is labelled as version 0.2, it seems to be fine so far – it’s not crashed on me, all the sites I use are rendering fine, and I’ve not yet experienced the serious memory leak problem I usually have with Firefox.

Unfortunately, somebody has spotted something rather dodgy in the terms and conditions attached to downloading it and using it:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, 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 Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

(my emphasis)

Which in a nutshell says, any content you post to a forum, blog, photosharing website, or whatever, you are granting Google a license to also re-use that content for its own purposes of saying how ace the Chrome product is.

As they say on the modern intertubes – Ts&Cs EPIC FAIL.