Yesterday, I posted about a new site called Photrade and it’s license agreement. Basically, section F of their license gave them the permanent right to do anything to your images with out compensation.
Their site looks cool and it provides features that I haven’t seen anywhere else, but the license was too broad for my comfort. Within 4 hours, they had revised their license. The updated license gives Photrade the rights to use your images in order to operate the web site and to provide the functionality that the web site gives you.
That’s really cool. The updated license is completely appropriate for their business needs with out reserving any permissions that they would not need to operate their site. The change in the agreement is very similar to the changes that Adobe made with licensing for Photoshop Express, except that Photrade revised the license with 4 hours.
From the comments posted to my earlier post, it sounds like the original license was drawn up by lawyers seeking to provide the greatest level of protection to their client. My guess is that no one looked at section F too close enough to realize how broad the rights were that were being granted to Photrade. I’m sure that the people behind Photrade had no intention on reselling the images, but since the original license gave them that right in perpetuity, that part needed to be revised. And it was revised in under 4 hours. For revising and publishing a legal contract, that turn around time is very impressive. Without knowing the people behind Photrade, the speed in which they revised their license says a lot about their character.
Now that I’m comfortable with the license agreement, I’m looking forward to trying Photrade. For more information about Photrade, take a look at their site tour video.