Sunday 11 March 2012

NIKON: we want to steal your memories

I bought a new Nikon S9100 recently. When you buy a Nikon you are invited to join their free photo sharing website My Picturetown, where you can share photos, and arrange them into galleries called photomoves.

I thought, why not? I could make use of a photo sharing website. While I usually disregard the legal mumbo-jumbo of signing up for products or services, I decided to give this one a look. Maybe it was this recent article about Pinterest that peaked my interest in legal terms of service.

Under a section called Intellectual Property I found this:

You hereby grant to Nikon a worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, full right and license to publish, copy, reproduce, modify, exhibit, perform, exploit, display, transmit, distribute, make derivative works of, license, include in compilations, and/or otherwise use User Content contained in any and all Photomovies, in any format and through any means, in any media now known or hereafter created, for any purpose whatsoever.
That is absolutely terrible. If you post a picture of your Grandma, Nikon can stick the head of a donkey on her and "exploit" her in ways not presently known to man, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.

Are other photo sharing sites this bad? I may just have to continue using my personal web site to share photos. It's a bit of a pain, but I don't feel inclined to give away the rights to all of my photos at the moment.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a front for porn ads.

Anonymous said...

If you use Shaw they have some kind of personal photo archive (videos 2 ?) that you can use to share your photos with family & friends.

Jason said...

Actually it isn't terrible.

If you read it carefully they are basically requesting the rights to post your images on their website for all to see.

My wife worked in the stock photo world for quite a while dealing with rights and rights management, and if you are going to post images to a public site you are going to need to give the owner of that site a pretty wide license so that you can't sue them.

Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr etc has pretty much the same agreement with their users.

Jason said...

Lets break it down into pieces...

You hereby grant to Nikon a worldwide (as in "worldwide web")

royalty-free (they ain't paying you)

fully paid-up (nor do they owe you anything)

perpetual (you can't limit the time they hang onto the image)

irrevocable (obviously)

non-exclusive (they can't demand that you not post the image anywhere else)

full right and license to publish (they need that to publish it on their website)

copy (they may have backups and multiple servers)

reproduce (see above)

modify (they need that to create thumbnails etc)

exhibit, perform, exploit, display (i.e. host publicly on the web)

transmit, distribute (to allow others to view/download on the web)

make derivative works of (back to thumbnails or collages of images)

license.

cherenkov said...

Sure, but this seems completely unnecessary: "in any format and through any means, for any purpose whatsoever."

 
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