Licence
Your content remains yours, which means that you retain any intellectual property rights that you have in your content. For example, you have intellectual property rights in the creative content that you make, such as reviews that you write. Or you may have the right to share someone else’s creative content if they’ve given you their permission.

We need your permission if your intellectual property rights restrict our use of your content. You provide Google with that permission through this licence.

What's covered
This licence covers your content if that content is protected by intellectual property rights.

What’s not covered
This licence doesn’t affect your privacy rights – it’s only about your intellectual property rights
This licence doesn’t cover these types of content:
publicly available, factual information that you provide, such as corrections to the address of a local business. That information doesn’t require a licence because it’s considered common knowledge that everyone’s free to use.
feedback that you offer, such as suggestions to improve our services. Feedback is covered in the Service-related communications section below.
Scope
This licence is:
worldwide, which means that it’s valid anywhere in the world
non-exclusive, which means that you can licence your content to others
royalty-free, which means that there are no monetary fees for this licence
Rights
This licence allows Google to:

host, reproduce, distribute, communicate and use your content – for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere that you go
publish, publicly perform or publicly display your content, if you’ve made it visible to others
modify and create derivative works based on your content, such as reformatting or translating it
sublicense these rights to:
other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share photos with people that you choose
our contractors who’ve signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the Purpose section below
Purpose
This licence is for the limited purpose of:

operating and improving the services, which means allowing the services to work as designed and creating new features and functionalities. This includes using automated systems and algorithms to analyse your content:
for spam, malware and illegal content
to recognise patterns in data, such as determining when to suggest a new album in Google Photos to keep related photos together
to customise our services for you, such as providing recommendations and personalised search results, content and ads (which you can change or turn off in Ad Settings)
This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received and when it is stored.
using content that you’ve shared publicly to promote the services. For example, to promote a Google app, we might quote a review that you wrote. Or to promote Google Play, we might show a screenshot of the app that you offer in the Play Store.
developing new technologies and services for Google consistent with these terms
Duration
This licence lasts for as long as your content is protected by intellectual property rights.

If you remove from our services any content that’s covered by this licence, our systems will stop making that content publicly available in a reasonable amount of time. There are two exceptions:

If you already shared your content with others before removing it. For example, if you shared a photo with a friend who then made a copy of it, or shared it again, then that photo may continue to appear in your friend’s Google Account even after you remove it from your Google Account.
If you make your content available through other companies' services, it’s possible that search engines, including Google Search, will continue to find and display your content as part of their search results.