The web-based economy is bizarre. In the real world you naturally expect to pay for products and services, but out in the virtual world everything has to be free. It’s the world’s biggest all-you-can-eat buffet, in which the browser can gorge themselves day-in and day-out for absolutely nothing. And woe betide the naive web-based developer who breaks the unwritten rule and suggests that they might like something in return.

This point hit home recently when looking at the mini-storm that broke out regarding Adobe’s new Photoshop Express service. Like everything else on the web signing up for Photoshop Express is free – at least for the first 2GB of storage space. However, the original terms and conditions made it clear that by posting to the public galleries you were granting Adobe a “worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from… such Content.” (terms since entirely rewritten)

Like everyone else my original reaction was horror. They’re planning to sell on my photos! How dare they? All that money should be coming to me! Daylight robbery!

But let’s stand back a little… and get real.

To begin with: of course Adobe wants to make money from developing and hosting the Photoshop Express site. It has to make money to pay for the developers’ time and expertise and the considerable hosting infrastructure costs involved and for the shareholders’ investment. That’s not greed it’s common sense.

More to the point, it’s actually in your interest for Adobe to make money from the site – that way it can put more money into making the site better, adding new functionality, boosting free space and so on. In short: give you more for free.

So how do you actually go about making money on the web? For non-ecommerce content-based sites the answer is simple: by including links to e-commerce sites that are paid-for as advertising or through commission. It’s not selling directly but it’s selling-on the chance of selling directly.

So maybe advertising was all that Adobe ever meant by “deriving remuneration”. Certainly the quickly revised terms make it clear that “These limited licenses do not grant Adobe the right to sell or otherwise license Your Content or Your Shared Content on a stand alone basis.” Panic over. It’s only indirect selling. Status quo restored.

But would it necessarily be so bad if Adobe really did want to directly sell on your photos? Are there no circumstances in which you’d sign up to those original terms?

After all what are your photos actually worth? Be honest now. When was the last time an agency got in touch to ask if you had a great picture of a penguin at dusk or a rotting apple? Of course you might happen to have just what they want on your hard disk but without an intermediary site the sale would simply never happen. In other words: you wouldn’t actually be losing anything real.

But clearly Adobe would be gaining (assuming that anyone ever did buy one of your images) and that’s not fair. But it’s gaining already through those paid-for links and no-one minds about that. And remember you actually want Adobe to gain if it’s not coming out of your pocket.

OK but if Adobe gains you should too – and directly. Agreed – but what? On reflection, the answer is obvious: unlimited storage. If I had to choose between shelling out actual cash to get the clear benefit of unlimited storage – currently $25 per year on Flickr – or giving up a purely theoretical right to commercial usage that simply wouldn’t happen otherwise I might well choose the latter. If enough others did too Adobe would quickly build up an enormous stock photo resource and, with it, another relatively painless model for generating revenue to help keep providing a valuable service for free.

More to the point it would also enable its members’ photos to reach a wider audience. Isn’t that what photo sharing is for?