License to display your online files … BEWARE

Adobe Air Acrobat.com. It seems like a great new pdf-conversion, file sharing, screen-sharing, collaboration, video-conferencing tool. Caveat: remember my post only a couples weeks ago regarding how ADrive (online file service) apparently reserves the right to share your metadata with its partners?

Say hello to the new adobe air acrobat.com services agreement, paragraph 5.1 regarding “Your Content”:

…By maintaining your Content on the Services, you grant to Adobe a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and fully paid license under all intellectual property rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, and reformat your Content solely to deliver the Services to you. Adobe shall make commercially reasonable efforts to block the uploading of Content to the Services that contains viruses detected by using industry standard virus detection software.

(Attorneys, especially) Yes, that was the hair on the back of your neck standing up. If a file service of any type reserves the right to “copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display” your communications or work-product, please re-consider. As always, a little due diligence goes a long way; read the services agreement.

*Update: see Erik Larson’s (from Adobe) comments (below) in response to this post (thank you Erik), as well as his interview by Scoble, later the same day:  http://tinyurl.com/67otq8