Recently there’s been a lot of excitement about Adobe’s launch of a free online version of Photoshop, Photoshop Express. However the biggest squeals weren’t of delight and you only have to take a look at the original Terms and Conditions to see why…

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.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that basically you were handing over your all rights as originator and giving Adobe free rein to make money from your photos however it saw fit!

Adobe responded quickly to dowse the inevitable flames with John Nack quoting the PSX team as saying “The original terms of service implied things we would never do with the content within Photoshop Express.” More importantly the relevant terms and conditions were quickly updated and are entirely different and much more end-user friendly in all ways.

So is that the end of the matter? Well it certainly means that the conditions are no worse than those commonly found on photo sharing sites such as Flickr and so should be no bar to joining up to Photoshop Express and taking it for a spin (it’s well worth a look if only to see what modern Flex-based RIAs are capable of).

However is this a case of “there’s no smoke without fire”? After all you don’t normally leave lawyers to just come up with something off the top of their heads (expensive) and then post it up to see if anyone complains (very expensive). And did no-one at Adobe think of looking at how other photo sharing sites managed copyright before launching such a major new service?

Moreover, while the Terms and Conditions have been updated, at the time of writing, the Photo Express FAQ still reads:

“What rights do I have to my photos?”#! Excuse me – splutter – but that phrasing is just bizarre. To my mind the implication is that having transferred all rights going to Adobe I now need to be told which rights Adobe is kind enough to let me retain.

Am I the only one that’s not entirely convinced that this all an innocent mistake but smacks of something a little bit deeper like a planned policy?

But before I get accused of an anti-Adobe conspiracy theory, I’ll float another question that I intend to return to shortly in a follow-up post: Are there really no circumstances in which you’d be happy to sign up to those original terms?