Summary of Blogger Terms and Conditions

Summary of Blogger Terms and Conditions

This is a summary of Google Blogger Terms and Conditions. Some parts are quoted verbatim, most parts are in my words. Very few people read them. Me included. But we agree to abide by them. Do we? Yes 99.9% do. Google Blogger is extremely popular because it is extremely good. It is very proficient and the person(s) who devised it should get a knighthood! I won't go over all the terms and conditions just the ones that catch my eye. But please read them. We owe it to Google to read them and to make sure that we comply with them. Note: this page was written in about 2009. The terms may have changed.

1. You have to be 13 years of age to use Google Blogger. Not many know that, I think. There are some very savvy 12 year olds out there who could and might use Blogger. For example there are a lot of young girls who use the social networking sites.
   
   
2. Google has the right to suspend, terminate the service and/or your account without notice and liability. Comment: This seems onerous. But Google wouldn't bin Blogger unless there was a massively good and pressing reason and it would warn people. Notice how they politely warn us of pending outages. This term is playing safe for Google. And fair enough. It is free. They can have any terms they like. As for individual accounts this might be a problem because the work would be lost (some may be saved) but it would only happen I would suggest if the person had been in breach of the Blogger agreement.


3. Violation of content policy may result in termination of the blog. Comment: The content policy is extremely sensible. It is basically common sense. It can be seen here.


4. Google explains its Privacy Policy. The video below does to. Comment: This refers to how Google use the information that we enter into Blogger about ourselves:


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6. Google can limit the storage space of Blogger. Comment: This wouldn't affect 99% of Bloggers but is worth knowing. For example it might limit the size of a blog. I don't know.


7. Google can if needs must access your blog to read it etc. Sounds fine and sensible to me. It has to reserve the right to do this for obvious reasons.


8. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. Comment: This is reproduced verbatim as it is important. This term protects us the user. It allows us to retain rights over our work. However, Google retains the right to use the content -- "you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services" Fine, I would love Google to use my content!
9. Blogger responds to breaches of copyright. This is important to me as I publish the fantastic photos of Helmi Flick on this site and she is a professional photographer. They have a page on the subject: Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Blogger
10. Note: I don't see a term relating to whether we can remove the navbar at the top of the blog page. A fairly large number of people do this. A lot of the templates circulating on the internet delete the navbar. These blogs are not removed so I presume it is allowed. But, I think it is useful and should stay. The way a site looks is less important than the way it works and the content it contains.

This list is not comprehensive. As I said I have just picked some that stand out.