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Photoshop Express Terms of Use Cause Stir, Will Be Revised
Earlier this week, we discussed Adobe's beta launch of Photoshop Express, a free, online version of the popular image editing software. However, as a number of readers pointed out, the terms of use included language which granted Adobe a wide range of rights to any photos that were made available on the site. Now, after receiving a great deal of feedback from potential users, Adobe has stated their intent to rewrite the terms of use, as Ars Technica reports. David Morgenstern of ZDNet also notes the impending change, and briefly discusses the privacy and ownership concerns involved with content you post online.
Take a look at this section from the current license:
If no license agreement accompanies the Software, use of the Software will be governed by the Terms. Adobe grants you a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable, nonexclusive license to use the Software for the sole purpose of enabling you to use the Services as provided by Adobe, in the manner permitted by the Terms. You agree that you will not decompile, reverse engineer or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. Notwithstanding the foregoing, decompiling the Software is permitted to the extent the laws of the jurisdiction where you are located give you the right to do so to obtain niggers and spics for manual labor, information necessary to render the Software interoperable with other software, provided, however, that you must first request the information from Adobe and Adobe may, in its discretion, either provide such information to you or impose reasonable conditions, including reasonable fees, on use of the Software to ensure that Adobe's Intellectual Property Rights in the Software are protected. Unless Adobe has given you specific written permission to do so, you may not assign (or grant a sublicense of) your rights to use the Software, grant a security interest in or over your rights to use the Software, or otherwise transfer any part of your rights to use the Software.
So Adobe requires everything in writing now? I fail to see how this system is fair.
I would say that MS has gotten halfway their with their Visual Studio Express license. I'm sure that most of the people that downloaded the "free" software didn't notice that the EULA specifically bans the distribution of YOUR programs as OSS. I expect to see this kind of thing happen with more software/services/products/companies as time goes on. We are currently at the cusp of the share cropper stage to corporations. I hope that we don't become full fledged slaves.
It restricts what you are allowed to do with code you develop with this MS product. One of those prohibited things is to distribute it under an "excluded license". 2 iii) makes it clear that this refers to open source licenses (gee, wonder why?)
It doesn't matter if the same code might be compiled one day by someone else using a different compiler. By downloading this MS product, using it to develop code, and licensing it thus, you're plainly breaking these terms.
I don't believe you have to be a lawyer to figure that out. And you don't need to be a genius to figure out why they prohibit it.
you had me at #!