2008/7/28 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
So which is it? If its the second, then the portion of the content posted by users is licensed under whichever license they choose. Is item 8 intended to allow Google to publish the content through Knol or some other as yet undetermined service?
You hold all the rights but license them to google. Section 8 is partly allowing Knol to publish without worrying about copyright but also allowing google to do whatever they like with the content without having to worry about copyright (screenshots in ads incorporating into google maps or some future social networking stuff whatever).
It's a fairly standard clause and not really a problem except that it creates issues if you wish to upload third party that is under a copyleft license. There are a couple of ways google could get around the problem but they are not likely to consider it enough of an issue to do anything about it.