The combination of Google's new storage service, Google Drive, and the company's recently unified terms of service and privacy policy, have riled the Internet into demanding to know why Google seemed to be claiming ownership of their customers' files. As it turns out, the company claims no ownership—it says so right in the terms of service, and a comparison between Google Drive's terms and that of other storage services turns up few material differences, except for a couple of questionable terms that may land your content in Google's promotional materials.
In a comparison piece, The Verge noted that the terms of service from four major cloud storage services—Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Google Drive—all claim no ownership of the files you give them. Several publishing outfits raised the alarm about a clause in Google's terms of service that states Google reserves the right to "use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" content uploaded to their services. But as The Verge pointed out, other services have similarly expansive, and sometimes more expansive, terms, and those services mean only to use them in service of, well, the services.
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