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Comment by gchadwick | Hacker News Reader

The devil really is in the details here, a tweet further down the thread quotes the new terms of use: https://x.com/Stretchedwiener/status/1798390688830402802

> Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, display, distribute, modify, create derivate works based on, publicly perform, and translate the content

(typed from the image, may have some mistakes!)

Which to be seems astounding! Especially for professional software such as photoshop where many many of its users will be working on behalf of clients and this clause would likely breach agreements with those clients and for other users making content for themselves they understandably don't want to allow Adobe to 'publicly display' their work.

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You can only grant something you have the rights to, so basically, they are asking you to do something you can't.

I don't have the rights of my client's product.

I want to see how it plays in court.

You granting someone rights to material you don’t have makes you liable twice right? If your friend lent you his car and you lent it to someone else, you become liable twice not zero times.

If I'm signing a contract to sell you something I don't have, e.g., the Brooklyn Bridge, then I'm liable.

If you sign a contract to license something to Adobe that you don't have the rights to, you're now at fault.

Either get a good liability insurance, or avoid using Adobe.

> Either get a good liability insurance, or avoid using Adobe

Or get the client to direct you to use Adobe even with this clause.

Easiest solution is to get the client and Adobe to agree to what rights each of them get.

THIS. And the moment that the client expresses reservations about this strategy (which your approach to the subject was trying to elicit), you start talking about the alternatives to continued use of Adobe.

You don't have the right to upload your client's product, yet you use software that uploads your client's product.

You're correct that the two conflict, but I think the courts would have a problem with you for using a product that breaches the employment contract you signed rather than rule that Adobe is at fault here.

I think so, you have to pull in the customer and let them know you planning on using the adobe product and since adobe demands they have full access to the customer’s proprietary media they will have to agree to that as well. How that happens I’m not sure? Have them buy an adobe license for you to use? I guess at that point you need lawyers or their full permission to hand over their ideas to Adobe, otherwise you’re gonna be libel if it leaks/gets copied/etc

Having them buy a license would probably work. You could also have this stuff specified in your contract with your employer.

Realistically, businesses will either shrug and be fine with you using Adobe stuff, or they'll find someone else (who still uses Photoshop, but doesn't know or warn about this stuff). I doubt the person hiring artists knows or cares about this stuff until an actual leak takes place.

Everyone should edit some copyrighted works in private. If Adobe goes on to publish them publicly, they will be seen in court pronto.

Poison the well?

and holding your data hostage until you do agree

It's been that way for the Service as far back as Archive.org has archived Adobe's general terms of service which was 2015-05-31. Here was the TOS then:

> 3.2 Licenses to Your Content in Order to Operate the Services. We require certain licenses from you to your content to operate and enable the Services. When you upload content to the Services, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable, and transferrable license to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify (so as to better showcase your content, for example), publicly perform, and translate the content as needed in response to user driven actions (such as when you choose to store privately or share your content with others). This license is only for the purpose of operating or improving the Services.

They changed from "Services" to "Services and Software" in June of 2018:

> 4.3 Licenses to Your Content in Order to Operate the Services and Software. We require certain licenses from you to your Content in order to operate and enable the Services and Software. When you upload Content to the Services and Software, you grant us a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify (so as to better showcase your Content, for example), publicly perform, and translate the Content as needed in response to user driven actions (such as when you choose to privately store or share your Content with others). This license is only for the purpose of operating or improving the Services and Software.

It seems that the business world has traversed four distinct eras, even though various companies appear to be in different stages of each:

The Era of Volume Sales: Customer was just a number, and the primary goal was to maximize profits. Sears and so on...

Required Relationships but Poor Service: Businesses recognized the need for customer relationships but failed to deliver effective customer service. Like in monopolistic AT&T, where customer service was notoriously bad...

Stellar Customer Service At Least As An Idea: Businesses began focusing on exceeding customer expectations with exceptional service. Early Amazon, Zappos and so on

New Era of Customer Exploitation: Companies move to a stage where they exploit their customers by overstepping privacy provisions or signed agreements, driven by the desire to maximize ad revenue or leverage data for AI. Facebook...Adobe...examples so many there is even no need to add more...

Well, if you want to call that a "detail", then yes.

A corporation taking possession of everything you create does not feel like a "detail" to me.

Makes me wonder if section 4.2 (the part you quote) was part of the update or if it has been there for before? Adobe's official communication [1,2] does not seem to indicate 4.2 changed with this update?

[1] The popup in OP only mentions sections 2.2, 4.1, 5.2 and 14.1 [2] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/06/06/clarification-a...

A lot of these services have draconian terms, but nobody reads them. It's kind of funny that an innocent change in one part of the agreement might prompt people to read the whole agreement and realize there are outrageous parts that have been there forever.

One agreement I do read carefully every time is employment contracts, and it always makes me extremely angry, but what am I going to do? My family needs to eat. I sometimes complain about certain terms to co-workers and they almost always comment that their contract didn't have those terms, but I bet it does and they just didn't read it.

> but what am I going to do?

While employed, looking for a different buyer of your labor at preferable terms. During the negotiation process, cross out anything you disagree with.

but I bet it does and they just didn't read it

Actually, in my case, it’s true.

I had three terms removed from my contract that I didn’t like - initialed by both me and our CFO/Legal Counsel, and further annotated at the end of the contract before we both signed.

She told me at the time that I was the first person to ask for this in the 15 years she’d been there.

Way back in the 1990s in the UK I refused to sign a contract that had terms I saw as being illegal (pertaining to holiday/PTO).

The three directors finally agreed to remove the terms (after wasting 2 months on it) the same day I turned in my notice to start a new job paying £6K more without dumb requirements in the contract!

Almost all the instances of people getting upset by language like that it's because they refuse to understand that it's required for you the customer being able to share the photo with others.

Why sublicense? Well, because the way they create the service may involve a third party CDN.

In this case though, the limiting part where this license will ONLY be used to do what you the customer intended (e.g. share or publish the photo on their platform) is missing. And that's suspicious.

but it didn't matter weather they have a reasonable use case for it

it's a gross overreach they could abuse at any point in time without any additional consent from you

one which can force you to grant them permissions you legally are not allowed to do

weather they had no intention to to abuse it really is irrelevant as long as they didn't legally constrain themselves further in ways they don't do

furthermore given Adobes post actions assuming they have no intention to abuse it and will not start having such intentions in the future is IMHO highly foolish with a large degree of worldly innocence

I agree. Like I said, most of these "sublicense[...]third parties[...]publish" things end with "for the sole purpose of providing the service you asked for".

This license doesn't seem to do that. And that's a problem. Because then they can abuse it.

I thought the third paragraph in my previous comment made it clear that I'm not excusing Adobe, here. Your reply seems to assume that I'm on Adobe's side.

I'm really interested wether this will blow up in their faces or not, they have some power over their subjects - oh sorry - users.

I mean if you’ve been using their products for years or even decades, it would be a hard pill to swallow that to now get work done for a client you have to move over to gimp or photopea because of this ridiculous new license.

IANAL, but it seems to me that this is meaningless, vague, non-enforceable legal dribble, probably designed as some kind of catch-all for internal purposes (indeed, it even says it’s for “operating or improving the Services or Software”). Obviously Adobe would still be subject to copyright infringement laws if they were to ever actually use a client’s work for profit. This TOS does not exempt a corporation from an entire class of laws designed to protect copyright holders.

Yes, that's exactly what Instagram argued when they changed their TOS, too.

And now they're training AI on your images.

Never trust a corporation when it says "trust us".

IANAL. See the part about "grant license". This is all about copyright.

Legalese seems to be a "choose your own adventure"--or rather, "choose your own permutation"--that results in many simple statements. One of those simple statements would be: "For the purposes of improving the software, you grant us license to create derivative works based on your content."

I get what you’re saying, but consider that I could take someone’s work of art and create infinite derivatives of it, which is not illegal, unless I try to claim them as my own and sell them.

At least in the USA it seems you need permission for derivative works regardless of your intent in making them:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work

Seems like this is a language change for their Ai work.

...so, AI training.

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