Photoshop Express: All Your Images Are Belong to Us
Adobe recently launched Photoshop Express, the company’s new online photo editing and sharing service, but as savvy readers have pointed out, to use Express you need to agree to terms of service that appear to grant Adobe the “worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable” right to do basically whatever it wants with your images.
Obviously those are unacceptable terms for most people, especially given that there are plenty of other free online image editors that don’t involve giving any rights to your photos.
While the Photoshop Express TOS is probably the result of a disconnect between Adobe’s lawyers and, well, the real world; until the TOS are changed you might want hold off on uploading any images to Photoshop Express.
John Nack, Adobe’s Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, reports that the Photoshop Express team has responded to questions about the license saying, “we reviewed the terms in context of your comments — and we agree that it currently implies things we would never do with the content.”
The relevant section of the Photoshop Express TOS states:
8 Use of Your Content. 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 response Nack received goes on to say that the Adobe legal team is “making it a priority to post revised terms that are more appropriate for Photoshop Express users.”
We certainly hope that the legal team makes that a top priority since without a more acceptable TOS, Photoshop Express is going to be dead in the water.
See Also:
- Adobe Photoshop Express Puts the Power of Photoshop Online
- Another Tantalizing Peek At Photoshop Express
- Adobe Shows Off Online Version Of Photoshop
- Picasa Gains Mapping Features, Goes Mobile
- Who Needs Photoshop? Flickr Debuts Online Image Editor
- FotoFlexer Tricks Out Online Photo Editing With Desktop-Style Tools
