Last week I wrote a little review of the new online image editing, management, and sharing application, Photoshop Express®. After writing and posting my review, blog reader Stefan dropped a little bit of a bomb in the comment section by pointing out the TERMS OF USE portion of the application. Like most users, I was so excited to jump in and check out what Adobe had come up with that I just clicked that little checkbox that says I agree to all the terms and jumped right into the application. Shame on me for not doing my homework! If I had read all the fine print, I would have come across this little items:
General Terms of Photoshop express
8. Use of Your Content.
a) Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
b) “Publicly accessible” areas of the Services are those areas of the Adobe network of properties that are intended by Adobe to be available to the general public. However, publicly accessible areas of the Services do not include Services intended for private communication or areas off the Adobe network of properties such as portions of World Wide Web sites that are accessible via hypertext or other links but are not hosted or served by Adobe.
Apparently I am not the first to worry about this since John Nack from Adobe systems addressed this issue on his blog on Friday. The response he received from the Photoshop Express team basically states that Adobe overstepped their bounds and are addressing the terms with their legal team to come up with something that doesn’t require you to grant them unlimited, no holds barred use of your images. Adobe also points out that posting your images means that they can be hijacked and used by anyone on the web so you run the same risk of someone stealing your images as you do on any other image sharing site. Hopefully Adobe will change this soon so that everyone will feel less nervous about using what I believe to be some ground breaking technology.
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Hi Jeff,
Do you have a flickr page? ( I just checked that one) They have same terms of use almost word for word. I believe its in section 8.
Check it out.
http://flickr.com/terms.gne
Jan