Adobe’s Photoshop Express is a great online photo editor, no doubt about that, but it’s not free (as in free beer). In exchange for using Photoshop Express, Adobe wants your photos.
If you read the General Terms, you’ll find under point 8. Use of Your Content. letter a. the following paragraph [via SPON]:
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.
As I understand it, Adobe, for instance, reserves the rights to sublicense your photos in Adobe Stock Photos to third parties. Without sharing the revenue with you of course. After all, Adobe already offered you its service Adobe Photoshop Express for “free”.
To me, that’s a show stopper for using Adobe Photoshop Express. Luckily there are other excellent online photo editors around who don’t claim such farreaching rights on your content like Adobe does: picnik, pixer.us or flauntR to name only a few of them.
User generated content means users care what happens to their content. They even might act like shareholders and want a vote or at least share their opinion. It’s a totally interesting aspect in business decision making processes – asking the crowd before the board.
I personally don’t care if Yahoo! is taken over by Microsoft or not. If the service is good and works for me, I use it, no matter what label is on it. [via Max]
Or Blog Friends, a Facebook application for your friend’s blogs. Strangely Michaela isn’t even registered at Facebook… well, never trust the friend finder!
Mapping and copyrights are two topics traditionally connected very strongly together. At least here in good old Europe people act very sensitive when re-publishing third party maps. Reading a couple of posts about Yahoo!’s new MapMixer, I started wondering how they would deal with that issue. On O’Reilly Radar I found an embedded MapMixer map containing a third party overlay clearly indicating “All rights reserved”. So maybe Brady Forrest actually holds the copyright, has the permission to redistribute or just missed the line
… Don’t upload any map or image that you don’t have the right to distribute …
when he uploaded the map below to Yahoo!’s MapMixer (assuming that it was him who added the map).
MapMixer is indeed an interesting service, but it’s really hard to find a copyright-free map. Except the ones available on Wikipedia. At least I couldn’t find any, neither do I own as person the copyrights of a map laying around here.
However, in many cases copyright holders won’t bother. And in many cases the service does make sense, like publishing a detailed campus map embedded in the Yahoo! street map to guide visitors.
But I doubt that most mapping agencies and map publishers will be very happy to see their maps popping up at Yahoo!. For instance, if I’d like to make a thousand black&white paper copies of the Austrian topographic map, I’d have to ask permission to do so. For publishing the same base map as image online, what MapMixer basically offers, one has to license the map for redistribution.
Regarding maps, I’d consider the potential user base for this service as rather low. But luckily MapMixer isn’t limited to maps only, users can upload any possible image and put it on the map. So it’ll be interesting to see what finally comes out.