Adobe (Photo) Shops their Online Users

David Heath
Tuesday, 01 April 2008 17:00

Business IT - Technology

Recent reports have boldly announced the release of Adobe Photoshop Express.  Very quickly, other reports surfaced, here for instance, regarding a major issue with the “General Terms of Use” agreement.  Basically, it sucked, big time!

Buried a couple of layers down the agreement structure – go to the site, click on ‘Terms of Use,” (no, you won’t find the problem there it’s more obscure than that), which oddly, brings up a page called “Additional Terms of Use.”  From there, click on the link for General Terms which finally unearths the problem.  This, in section 8:

“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 story first broke on Saturday, with bloggers suggesting that Adobe was working to remedy the ‘issue’ as soon as possible.  Perhaps, you might suggest, Adobe is bothered by this and is loudly proclaiming on their website that they’re working on it as fast as they can.

Nope.  Nothing there.  Nothing on the front page; nothing in the “press room.”

A few minutes ago (Tuesday evening, Australian time) I signed into the site – the agreement is still unchanged.  So much for concern about the problem.

Reading the general mood of the blogosphere, the writers don’t actually expect Adobe to change anything; that this is the first move in some new business plan.  Photography-oriented chat sites are brimming with angry Photoshop users suggesting that they may look elsewhere for their next upgrade.

All I can say to Adobe is, “gosh, that went well, didn’t it!”