As the state of technology gets worse and worse, observations by two dissident influencers become more and more relevant. The first is the Z Man, proprietor of the Z Blog, who has pointed out that if you don’t know what a tech company’s product is, then you are the product. Dovetailing with that remark, black pilled video blogger Devon Stack recently riffed on Steve Jobs, saying that in monopolistic markets, it’s not the people who come up with the best products, but the slickest marketers, who thrive.
Both statements have allegedly received fresh evidence, as some in the tech industry fear that Adobe’s new TOS makes you the product.
Earlier this week, Photoshop and Substance 3D developer Adobe found itself engulfed in a massive controversy after the community noticed changes to the company’s General Terms of Use, which now force the users of Adobe products to provide the company with unlimited access to their projects, yes, all of the projects, including those that might be under the NDA, for “content review” and other purposes.
Here’s the new TOS.
Related: The Internet of Shit
That Thumb Mike on X
According to Adobe’s new spyware-esque TOS, the company can access and view your creations through both automated and manual methods and even analyze your work using techniques such as machine learning. This has led many to believe that the company intends to use all user-generated content to train its AI models – a suspicion that aligns with Adobe’s recent focus on generative artificial intelligence.
An Adobe representative took to X in an effort to perform some damage control. Legendary WoW dev Mark Kern responded with a reasonable-sounding proposal to set users at ease.
Related: The Internet Is Still Dead
So did Adobe try to pull a PayPal on its users, get caught, and hastily walk their skulduggery back?
According to their content analysis FAQ, Adobe is only accessing user-generated material stored on their cloud servers. And users who object to Adobe’s use of their IP can opt out. The only exception, the company says, is content explicitly submitted to them for publication.
Time for the standard legal disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and nothing I say should be taken as legal advice.
That said, I deal with IP contracts all the time and have done so for years.
In my informed—but not expert—opinion, Adobe’s new TOS seems just this side of tolerable for now. But it contains major red flags for the probable near future.
First, and most obvious, Adobe’s TOS includes a clause wherein you grant them a worldwide, royalty-free license to use your IP. Their clarification that such use is for extremely limited purposes comes off as a smokescreen. Under US copyright law, the creator of a given intellectual property owns it and the entire bundle of rights that come into being along with it the moment he creates it. That’s why Adobe’s TOS has to include a license grant.
For some direct context, I’ve used Photoshop to make some of my book covers. If I agreed to their new TOS, I’d be granting Adobe a license to use my book cover for the purposes they stipulate if I:
- Save the image to their cloud, and
- forget to opt out.
And since I now know that taking those two steps would let Adobe use my IP in any way without compensating me, you can be sure I’ll avoid it like the plague.
In fact, I’m going to stop using Adobe products covered by this TOS as much as possible.
Because I’m running a business, and I don’t care who you are; you don’t get to use my IP in any fashion without providing me some consideration. Failing to enforce that caveat would be professiojnal negligence on my part.
That’s why accessing cloud users’ IP by default and making them opt out is the scummiest part of the new TOS. If they didn’t want to draw suspicion, Adobe should respect users’ IP by default, ask if they can use it, and then give those who say yes the chance to opt in.
And let’s not kid ourselves. The “We only use IP without compensation if it’s stored in the cloud” line rings hollow.
Because unless you’re reading this in Netscape Navigator on a i486 running Windows 95, you’re aware of the trend sweeping Big Tech of moving users from running software locally to cloud-based services.
It doesn’t take Nostradamus to foresee a near-future in which all Adobe customers have to use their cloud storage. It would be pretty easy for the company to remove users’ ability to opt out of the license grant at that point.
Not saying they will, just that it would be easy.
Do what you want, but I’m not trusting any Big Tech firm to resist that kind of temptation.
Just get informed. before Adobe’s new TOS makes you the product.
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