What if 'Terms of Service" or "Usage" change

[doodlingmonkey]

So much talk about who is responsible if joe schmo buys a cd of clipart at a yard sale if joe schmo now has the same rights for that clipart.  

What if Joe Schmo buys clipart from some place such as drawings-r-us and in the terms of service at the time of purchase it does not state that Joe Schmo cant use the artwork to create say "stamps" with the artwork.  

Then two years later drawings-r-us decides to go into "stamps" and decides that it does not want any of its customers to make "stamps".  It discovers Joe Schmo is making those "stamps", but has been for 2 yrs now.  

They tell Joe Schmo to stop.  What holds up?  The terms of service at the time of Joe Schmo's purchase, or their current terms of service, which Joe Schmo might not be aware of now at this time.

Joe Schmo printed his terms of service at time of purchase and has that, but what happens to the Jane Schmo who might not have the terms of service at the time of her purchase, and since the terms of service was online, the link now only shows current terms of service.

Should "drawings-r-us" have sent a certified letter to each purchaser of their designs to make sure that the change it terms of service was made aware of?  Should the end user have to check for change of service terms before they use the product everytime?

[GRiddick]

Good question, Joe

Clearly, a question like this should be asked to an experienced attorney who deals with software licensing and such.

Imageline has never changed its terms of service in its End User License Agreements (EULAs), nor has it ever authorized anyone else to change their license as it applied to our orginal illustrations and designs. That would seem to make this question moot for the purposes of this forum as it pertains to Imagline, but I do not mind throwing in my "two-cents" worth if that might be helpful.

I realized in December last year when we first started our reserach into the embroidery design industry that there would be a need for quite a bit of education to bring some of these embroidery designers, publishers, and digitizers up to speed on the typical "do's" and "don't" of "visaul arts" copyights. I have sent over 25 years dealing with these issues. I have tried to spread around some of that "hands on" education, but much of my advice seems to have been overshadowed by the personal smear campaigns we have found on this web site and within some of the Yahoo and Google chat and blog groups recently.

Generally, we find statements such as "all rights not specifically granted in this license agreement are serviced exclusively by the holders of these copyights". In the one case we were involved in quite a few years ago where something like this did come up, I am fairly certain that was the way the courts determined this important issue, as well.

Again, check with your attorney. I find the question intriguing myself.

Clearly, many, many people in the embroidery design industry, including the largest publishers of them all, determined that they had rights to convert digital clip art files to digital embroidery files and then market, distribute, or trade the resulting digital files. We clearly disagree as that pertains to our copyight-registered artwork, but there are a slew of clip art developers and publishers out here that may feel differently than we do at Imageline.

Sometimes you need to simly apply 'common sense' and 'logic' to these questions, along with legal guidance. Have you noticed how many embroidery design publishers are now promoting print versions of their embroidery designs and competing openly and aggressively against the clip art developers. What nut would encourage them to do that with an open-ended, unrestricted, commercial licensing agreement?

Please be sure to inform everyone on here of your findings. Many of the problems we are all dealing with here trace back to this particular issue. Thanks again for bringing it up for discussion on this forum.

George

George Riddick
Imageline, Inc.

[doodlingmonkey]

----Sometimes you need to simly apply 'common sense' and 'logic' to these questions, along with legal guidance. Have you noticed how many embroidery design publishers are now promoting print versions of their embroidery designs and competing openly and aggressively against the clip art developers------

Actually I have not seen anyone offering "printable" versions of their embroidery designs, unless it was a document that was mearly a thread chart to show you which colors were stitched out when.  Not all programs interpret the colors correctly when designs get to the machines.

And truely unless you are a big company such as Dakota Collectables, Brother, or Bernina, I do not know any independant digitizer who is becoming independantly wealthy off their work.  More like breaking even or losing money on their websites.

But I do know one clipart website who did not specify non usage of their clipart for embroidery, only for web templates or company logos or in a format where you could say copy the file as the original artwork and reuse again digitially.  Now that they have decided to offer some of their more generic clipart that can be auto digitized without much thought or technique, they have changed their terms of services from what it was 2 yrs ago.

Unfortunately even having your lawyer give his interpretation of what he thinks someone means in their term of service, doesn't necessarily mean your lawyer is going to interpretet it right especially with language that reads ".etc" in a term of service.  What .etc are you including in that?  Or are you hoping to CYA by being so vague??