this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
112 points (97.5% liked)
Privacy
32130 readers
1168 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bleh, I really hate to side with Google, especially when releasing this documentation benefits users and hiding it benefits Google.
But it seems weird for this new license to be legally binding. If someone committed this to the wrong repo, and that person didn't have legal authority over the original content, then how can they have legally relicensed it?
Not sure, if this is precisely the same in the US, but here in Germany, employees act on behalf of their company. So, if you write such a documentation, your copyright is assigned to the company, but just as much, you're allowed to license this copyrighted work.
In many cases, this is absolutely necessary to do for your daily work. Like, maybe your job is to work with external contractors that implement changes to these search ranking parameters.
There is some things, like entering a contract, which require a signature to be legally valid. And signing things, that is something that not everyone can do. But yeah, you don't need a signature for licensing.
I‘m not sure of the legal implications but I would assume that a third party must not have to question the validity of a written license and therefore an action like this makes the person who did it responsible to google and the licensee. Just my impression though, IANAL.