Photoshop Express' botched terms of service to be revised

Shortly after opening to the public, Adobe's Photoshop Express web-based photo editor came under scrutiny for a questionable clause in its Terms of Use.

The passage in question is the following: "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."

This passage differs greatly from two other photo sites' terms of service, Photobucket and Flickr.

"Photobucket does not claim any ownership rights in any User Content that you choose to post to the Site...However, by posting or making User Content available through the Site or via the Services, you hereby grant to Photobucket a nonexclusive, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, prepare derivative works from, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform (whether by means of a digital audio transmission or otherwise) and process your User Content, or any part of it, solely on and through the Site and Services... "

Flickr: "With respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service."

Note the crucial segment within Adobe's agreement that is absent from other sites: "..derive revenue or other remuneration from..."

Technically, this allows Adobe to sell every single photo that has been uploaded to its site. Contacted by several media outlets over the potential use of this clause, Adobe representatives acknowledged that its inclusion was, in fact, an oversight.

Adobe told blogger John Nack that the company's legal team will be posting a revised set of terms, as the clause leaves the door open for "things we would never do with content."