There’s a bit of legalese that’s ubiquitous in term of use agreements across the net. What you’ll find, at vritually any site that allows you to upload any content, is something like this:
[Company name] 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 [the company] 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.
I’ve written fairly extensively about this in the past. I’m no lawyer, but what that seems to say is that by uploading any content to the website, I get to maintain ownership, but I’m granting the company involved a perpetual, worldwide licence to my stuff, which allows them to make money off it without sharing any of that income with me.
Whenever I’ve raised this, largely in connection with cit-j sites, the response has been (a) we’d never do anything like that and (b) we need that language to give us the right to display your stuff on the web. The language used, though, takes it make further than that and that language has stopped me from participating in a number of cit-j and sharing sites because of my unwillingness to turn my stuff over to them with those provisions in place.
But something might be stirring, thanks not to cit-j content sites but to the new Photoshop Express online storage and editing service.
Macworld reports that users of the new service have complained about that section the user agreement and that it has pushed the company into changing it. As Adobe’ John Nack reports at his blog, quoting the Photoshop Express team:
We’ve heard your concerns about the terms of service for Photoshop Express beta. We reviewed the terms in context of your comments – and we agree that it currently implies things we would never do with the content. Therefore, our legal team is making it a priority to post revised terms that are more appropriate for Photoshop Express users.
This is encouraging for two reasons: one is that someone finally listened to what has been an admittedly low level of background chatter about the terms of use; the other is that Adobe may wind up providing the web with some new legalese that protects content creators much better while allowing sites that publish and share to continue to do so.
I’m watching and hoping Abode sets a new standard that is widely adopted.
Tags: legal, terms of use
