Adobe has announced PhotoShop Express, a “free” online image finishing system that YOU can use to cleanup, sharpen, filter, remove red-eye, and do a host of other things to your photos, which you can also publish online, share, and embed. It’s all “free” as old-school Adobe defines “free” : no charge, free, gratis, wonderfully replete of expense…. as long as you hand over ALL of your equity in your intellectual property.

That’s right. All of your rights to your own images, as per this part of the terms:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Now if it isn’t bad enough, take a look at how they deliver that small print information. It’s not part of the Terms you see when you bother to click the (tiny) “terms” hyperlink on the sign up page. It’s actually in a separate “additional terms” document that is “incorporated by reference” in the original (lengthy) terms document. And this “additional terms” document is far more lengthy than the initial one… about 8 screens worth of scrolling legalise on my 1600×1200 display. Oh and there is yet another lengthy document “incorporated by reference” in this document, which I didn’t have the patience to read.

As Adobe seems to be saying via this release: “Adope. It’s all about US. Screw you.”

The Google blog (which routinely uses the “nofollow” attribute according to Google’s guidelines for link management, has just posted a set of direct backlinks to the people they are calling “bionic posters” in the Google help forums. These back links are not nofollowed. They are genuine, live, link juice passing links. They are presented as a reward for participation… for helping Google’s customers for free, by answering questions in the forums.

When Google started the ridiculous “paid links are evil” debate, I was disappointed that such a bright group of kids would step into such an open-ended, impossible argument. When the search optimization community jumped into that trap yelling “Google is not the Government“, I was disappointed that so much energy would now be wasted on a negative, endless argument that would lead nowhere. Of course back links are “traded”, and of course they are “bartered” and of course there would be a micro-economy around the exchange of links based on some currency, and yes, of course money would represent the currency of choice for everyone not looking for a relationship at this time.

So I crafted a post for the new marketing community Sphinn and announced I wanted to get a phenomenal amount of votes. I was asking for votes, and would thank my voters with a back link. Of course it works… everyone needs backlinks, and this blog has a decent amount of page juice to pass around. That Sphin post is now approaching its target of 300 Sphinns (votes). It accomplished some of the secondary goals as well, which included raising awareness of Sphinn, encouraging more people to actively vote instead of just lurking, and I also encouraged more voting of comments as I see that as an early engagement that leads to more active participation.

But it didn’t (yet?) lead to some of the conversations I had hoped it would prompt. Despite some shallow discussions, nothing significant on the quid pro quo link exchange. And Google continued its attack on “paid links”.

Now Google, as it has to eventually, has started to openly barter direct backlinks from its own properties. Really, folks, it HAS to barter, just as we have to barter. To think otherwise is ridiculous. Now maybe we can point to it as a living example and maybe, just maybe, webmasters will start to wake up and smell the coffee.

According to the Google blog post:

While there are lots of helpful people in our groups, we have some that really stand out as being exceptionally active, helpful, competent and friendly. They volunteer time and energy to help build a great community and to help webmasters all around the world. In order to more publicly recognize their contributions, we’re calling them our Bionic Posters. We want to highlight their outstanding efforts and thank them for the sound advice they’ve offered to so many.

Following that are 12 direct links to the poster’s websites, along with links to their profiles, using their names as anchor text. There is a 13th that did not get a backlink - and it is an SEO who did not identify herself by name or website. I really would have loved to see Google direct link out to a website called SEO101, but I’m not that lucky today.

The take-away is this, folks: Google is controlling you not for some benevolent reason, but in order to control the currency of the web. It took X amount of effort in those forums, dedicated for free by those posters, to earn a direct backlink from Google’s very popular webmaster blog. What was that worth? Google got to decide. Google thinks it is fine to barter in links without the nofollow… it just wants the price for such links to remain pitifully low, managed by Google. Can you see it now? Do we really need to wait a few more years until it is perfectly clear beyond any doubt that Google has all of the money and there is no room for us to share?
A few analogies for those who benefit from analogies:

• SEOs are the card counters of the Internet. Google says gambling is illegal, except in their casino, by their rules, which are rigged in their favor and able to be adjusted at any time, in real time.
• The search optimization community, by investing energy into Google’s arguments, is decimating the public market for SEO, increasing the profits of the underground and so-called Black Hat practitioners and giving Google the room it needs to increase its unofficial, mostly unaccountable monopoly on search traffic.

My how things change in just a few years. Today, AP reporters proudly proclaim their “investigation” of a security loophole on Facebook, describing how they used the hack to peruse materials that clearly were posted to Facebook with an expectation of privacy:

“A security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.’s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site’s privacy controls. The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip…Using Ng’s template, an AP reporter was able to look up random people on Facebook and see the most recent pictures posted on their personal profiles even if the photos were supposed to be invisible to strangers. The revealed snapshots showed Italian vacations, office gatherings, holiday parties and college students on spring break. The AP also was able to click through a personal photo album that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted in November 2005. — http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijANq3fmx9AZNNrf7Q1PwCN1cKUAD8VK51UG1“

Just a few years ago, Adrian Lamo was hunted as a fugitive for justice for similar URL playfulness:

“Lamo has become famous for publicly exposing gaping security holes at large corporations, then voluntarily helping the companies fix the vulnerabilities he exploited — sometimes visiting their offices or signing non-disclosure agreements in the process. Until now, his cooperation and transparency have kept him from being prosecuted. Lamo’s hacked Excite@Home, Yahoo, Blogger, and other companies, usually using nothing more than an ordinary Web browser. Some companies have even professed gratitude for his efforts: In December, 2001, Lamo was praised by communications giant WorldCom after he discovered, then helped close, security holes in their intranet that threatened to expose the private networks of Bank of America, CitiCorp, JP Morgan, and others. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888“

They ordered Lamo to pay $65,000 for so-called “use” of Lexus Nexus (even though the usage was on an unlimited plan) and 6 months home confinement, plus probation. Truth is, when he hacked the NY Times and exposed their sloppy-at-best online security, he demonstrated how unworthy the Times was of trust, and thus how foolish some very high profile people were for trusting the New York Times:

“…he penetrated the New York Times, after a two-minute scan turned up seven misconfigured proxy servers acting as doorways between the public Internet and the Times private intranet, making the latter accessible to anyone capable of properly configuring their Web browser. Once inside, Lamo exploited weaknesses in the Times password policies to broaden his access, eventually browsing such disparate information as the names and Social Security numbers of the paper’s employees, … a database of 3,000 contributors to the Times op-ed page, containing such information as the social security numbers for former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler, Democratic operative James Carville, ex-NSA chief Bobby Inman, Nannygate veteran Zoe Baird, former secretary of state James Baker, Internet policy thinker Larry Lessig, and thespian activist Robert Redford. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888“

Today it’s not only OK for the AP reporter to browse around inside, but to write about it as if it were good investigative reporting. We only know what they tell us they looked at… they could probably have looked at anything on Facebook, which I believe, is why legislators made that sort of activity illegal years ago:

“Lamo has been charged in New York under Title 18 U.S.C. 1030 and 1029…The federal laws prohibit unauthorized access to a protected computer, and illegal possession of stolen “access devices” — a term that encompasses passwords, credit card numbers, and the like. — http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888″