Is Shogo Stealing the Rights to Your Digital Photos?

Written on Jul 21, 2008 by Brian and filed under News

Wireless digital picture frames are great for a lot of reasons, mostly they’re in demand because it’s easy to update the photos on your frame online via sites like Flickr, Picassa and so on. It’s important to read the Terms of Service though. As we see with Shogo, the service they offer to support their line of wireless digital picture frames actually claims rights to your images, and more.

This issue has been brought to light by Photo Attorney, a site that covers the often thorny issues of intellectual property ownership in photography. In this case, they’ve written an article detailing the disturbing terms and conditions of Shogo, a digital picture frame manufacturer based in Hong Kong. Shogo’s wireless frames use a service to essentially transfer your images over the Internet to the frame. Normally such a transaction would seem harmless, but there’s an important caveat in their terms and conditions.

By submitting, uploading, posting or displaying Content on or through ShogoLive, you hereby grant RealEase (and its successors and assigns) a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable licence under your copyrights or other intellectual property rights in such Content to:

1. reproduce, adapt, distribute, display, publish, create derivative works from, and use such Content in any manner (in whole or part) without any duty to account to you through the ShogoLive (including but not limited to RSS or other content feeds offered through ShogoLive) and other RealEase’s services; and

Shogo of course needs a license to handle and store your photos while they transfer them to your frame, but this statement gives them rights well beyond what’s needed for such. If you think that’s bad, the next quote is worse:

RealEase may also use, without compensation to you, any ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques contained in any communication you send to the ShogoLive for any purpose whatsoever, including but not limited to, developing, manufacturing and marketing products using such information.

And there you have it, Shogo can take any idea from your images, RSS feeds or whatever else you can send through their service t your frame and use it for Shogo’s gain.

Bottom line, terms of service are boring to read, but worthwhile in some cases, like this one.

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