Use Photoshop Express and Adobe Might Steal Your Stuff

Adobe launched Pho­to­shop Express not too long ago. It’s a web-​​based app that offers online photo edit­ing plus a lit­tle bit of flickr-​​esque com­mu­nity. You upload images, edit them in this online ver­sion of pho­to­shop, and then you can save them for oth­ers to view at your “per­sonal shar­ing address”. The whole thing’s kind of what­ever, and I wouldn’t even men­tion it if not for one thing. This is from the terms of use:

you grant Adobe a world­wide (because the inter­net is global), royalty-​​free (mean­ing we do not owe you any money), nonex­clu­sive (mean­ing you are free to license Your Con­tent to oth­ers) fully sub­li­cens­able (so that we can per­mit our affil­i­ates, sub­con­trac­tors and agents to deliver the Ser­vice on our behalf) license to use, repro­duce and mod­ify Your Con­tent solely for the pur­poses of oper­at­ing the Ser­vice and enabling your use of the Ser­vice. With respect to Your Shared Con­tent, you addi­tion­ally grant Adobe the rights to dis­trib­ute, pub­licly per­form and pub­licly dis­play Your Shared Con­tent (in whole or in part) for the sole pur­poses of oper­at­ing the Ser­vice and enabling your use of the Ser­vice and to sub­li­cense Your Shared Con­tent to Other Users sub­ject to the lim­i­ta­tions of Sec­tion 7 below.

For those of you who don’t want to bother read­ing or deci­pher­ing that, it means that when you upload some­thing to Adobe Express, you retain own­er­ship of your image but auto­mat­i­cally give Adobe the right to do any­thing they want with it pretty much with­out pay­ing you any money. Right?

They should prob­a­bly rethink this. I don’t know who’s going to be cool with that idea. Or maybe it’s just a way of restor­ing bal­ance to the uni­verse given that we ram­pantly steal their soft­ware. But I stopped upload­ing my pic­tures to Face­book a few months back for the same reason.

Posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 4:33 pm

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