Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Adobe's Controversial Photoshop Express EULA to Be Modified?

Since last week's release of Photoshop Express, the free online version of Photoshop, ire has been raised over a clause in the EULA. Adobe claims the issue in its EULA is an oversight, and it probably is, but they haven't exactly rushed to change it.

The EULA states in one of its paragraphs (in the Use of Content section):
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.
The troublesome part: the words "derive revenue or other remuneration." In other words, Adobe can use your content and make money off of it.

While Adobe most likely isn't going to make any money off of my pictures, I'm sure there are others they could make money off of. This is different that other photo sites, which typically have the rest of that paragraph but not the revenue portion.

Shutterfly, for example, says:
In the event that you post or upload to the Service, or otherwise submit to Shutterfly as part of your use of the Service, any materials including, without limitation, photographs and other images, text, graphics, sounds, data, links and other materials (collectively, “Submissions”), you will retain ownership of such Submissions, and you hereby grant us and our designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, perpetual, irrevocable right to use, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), create derivative works of, and publicly display and perform such Submissions, solely in connection with the Service ...
Photobucket says:
Photobucket does not claim any ownership rights in any User Content that you choose to post to the Site. After posting User Content to the Site,you continue to retain all ownership or license rights in your User Content and you continue to have the right to use your User Content as you did prior to such posting. However, by posting or making User Content available through the Site or via the Services, you hereby grant to Photobucket a nonexclusive, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, prepare derivative works from, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform (whether by means of a digital audio transmission or otherwise) and process your User Content, or any part of it, solely on and through the Site and Services, including without limitation (a) adapting the format of your User Content (for example by encoding or transcoding) for suitable display on the Site; and (b) displaying, in Photobucket's sole discretion, your public User Content in search results generated by the Photobucket search engine ...
Nope, no revenue being derived from either one.

Adobe's already indicated it will modify the EULA, and that the inclusion of the clause was an oversight. But at the time of this writing, the EULA still reads as abovef.

It seems like Apple and Adobe both need to take lessons in writing EULAs. Honestly, however, it seems like both errors were the result of copying-and-pasting a EULA from some other source, and not proofreading it properly. Kinda like the lack of proofreading I surprisingly see evefn on major media sites like the NY Times (me, I'm just one person, so I make mistakes).


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