If I make a Google Drive document publicly accessible, can others use that information as they wish or is there a license that applies? For example, if I record experimental data in a spreadsheet and generate a public sharing link, is this data now in the public domain available for any commercial and non-commercial use cases?
I chatted with the Google Suite support team about this but they did not know the answer…
Best Answer
From Google terms of service:
So the answer is no: other people cannot use your work as they wish just because you shared a Google Doc. (The "otherwise permitted by law" includes things like Fair Use concept of U.S. copyright law.)
The absence of a license does not mean "can use that information as they wish"; it's exactly the opposite. License is a permission to do certain things; if there isn't one, then no permissions are granted.
(Compare to Stack Exchange, where the user-contributed content is published under a certain license. That license gives others permission to, for example, redistribute or remix the content. There is no such thing with Google Docs.)