Subject: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 10:21:03 -0700
From: "Maheesh Jain" <mjain@cafepress.com>
To: <webmaster@giveneyestosee.com>


Hi M,

There seems to be some confusion regarding how you are reading both our
current and new Member Agreement with regards to copyright. I'd like to
chat with you to clarify any questions you might have. It is not our
intention (nor is it stated in the Member Agreement) that we can or will
take over the rights of our members artwork/content. So I want to see where
you might be reading that so we can clarify the language.

Please give me a call or let me know the best way to contact you. I
appreciate your time.

Thanks!

Maheesh
CafePress.com

My reply:

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 13:32:15 -0400
From: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>
To: Maheesh Jain <mjain@cafepress.com>
References: <00c701c32abd$aee42a40$0f00a8c0@corp.cafepress.com>


You are welcome to email me. I will not communicate in any way in which 
I do not have a written copy of the conversation. Feel free to contact 
me here with whatever information you wish to present.

Forwarning, I will make such discussions public as I feel this matter is 
the public's right to know.

Their Reply:
NOTE that they try to confuse the issue with the OLD Terms of Use and not the NEW one which this site is about

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 11:02:54 -0700
From: "Maheesh Jain" <mjain@cafepress.com>
To: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>
References: <00c701c32abd$aee42a40$0f00a8c0@corp.cafepress.com> <3EDE2D1F.8060902@giveneyestosee.com>


Hi M,

No problem - feel free to post whatever as most of this information is on
our message boards.

I think the general confusion is based around the belief that we will be
taking over the rights of artwork/content submitted on the CafePress.com
site. I know the legalese can be confusing, so it might help if I walk
through the language to clarify. If there is a misunderstanding on any of
these points, please let me know.

6.1 CafePress.com will solely and exclusively own all intellectual property
and other rights, title and interest in and to the CafePress.com Service,
and CafePress.com will have the sole and exclusive right to obtain trademark
and copyright registrations, patents and other protection therefor. You will
not acquire any right, title or interest in any rights of CafePress.com
under this Agreement or otherwise.

This clause basically states that CafePress owns the rights to the Web site
and service - and that we have the right to register and protect the
trademarks and copyrights to our service. This clause has nothing to do
with the content provided by our members.

6.2 You hereby grant to CafePress.com a non-exclusive, royalty-free right,
during the term of this Agreement, to utilize your existing trademarks,
trade names, designs and logos (collectively referred to as "Party Marks")
in connection with the advertising, promotion, production and sale of the
products and services you choose to sell in accordance with this Agreement.

This clause gives us the rights we need to produce and ship the items you
want to sell through our service. You give us a royalty-free and
non-exclusive right - which means we don't pay a licensing fee for the
artwork/content and our agreement is non-exclusive. This clause points out
you are the owner of your trademarks, names, designs and logos.

6.3 You grant CafePress.com permission to reproduce your Party Marks in
CafePress.com marketing and advertising, provided CafePress.com credits you
and/or the original artist as actual owner of the Party Marks. CafePress.com
will not represent ownership of any of your designs.

We run ads and promotions to drive traffic to our member's stores - and
when we do so and promote your store - we have to credit you as the owner of
your artwork. The last line specifically says "CafePress.com will not
represent ownership of any of your designs."

You write on your Web site: "Now...the really bad part (as if the rest
wasn't enough)...they've changed the policies of your copyright and
ownership of the items on their site. They now will claim exclusive,
royalty-free rights to publish, display and GAIN TRADEMARK REGISTRATION for
YOUR items."

Can you please let me know where in the Agreement you are seeing this (as
its not our intent nor the intent of the Agreement). Please keep in mind
that my goal is to clarify the Agreement and to modify it as necessary to
make sure this misunderstanding does not exist.

Thanks again for your time!

-Maheesh

This must REALLY be ruffling their tail feathers. Got another email from them a few hours later when I *gasp* hadn't checked my email and immediately replied:

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 15:00:53 -0700
From: "Maheesh Jain" <mjain@cafepress.com>
To: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>
References: <00c701c32abd$aee42a40$0f00a8c0@corp.cafepress.com> <3EDE2D1F.8060902@giveneyestosee.com>


Hi M,

Can you please confirm that you received my last email and let me know if
you have any questions regarding our trademark policies? We are receiving
some customer service inquiries from members that are very confused b/c of
the information on your Web site.

Thanks,.

Maheesh
CafePress.com

My Reply going back as I write this up:

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 18:32:15 -0400
From: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>
To: Maheesh Jain <mjain@cafepress.com>
References: <00c701c32abd$aee42a40$0f00a8c0@corp.cafepress.com>

It's well fine and dandy that you quote the OLD Terms of Service, but I refer to the NEW Terms of service which are quite different from what you are quoting.

6. Intellectual Property Rights

6.1 CafePress.com will solely and exclusively own all intellectual property and other rights, title and interest in and to the CafePress.com Service, and CafePress.com will have the sole and exclusive right to obtain trademark and copyright registrations, patents and other protection therefor, and you will not acquire any right, title or interest therein, under this Agreement or otherwise.

6.2 You hereby grant to CafePress.com a royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, right and license to use the trademarks, trade names, designs, logos and other images that you upload to your image basket in connection with your use of the CafePress.com Service ("Party Marks"). If you or CafePress.com terminate your account, CafePress.com will cease its use of the Party Marks within 90 days of the termination.

6.3 If you submit content to CafePress.com (on a message board, in connection with your participation in a CafePress.com contest or otherwise) you hereby grant CafePress.com a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive right and license to use such content (or any portion thereof) on the CafePress.com Web Site and in email "newsletters" to promote or advertise any of your Shops or the CafePress.com Service, with or without identifying the content as yours.

6.4 You may only use images and artwork you create with the CafePress.com Service in your Shop or to promote your Shop or the CafePress.com Service. Any other use of such images and artwork is strictly prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained from CafePress.com.
Source: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/new_memberagreement.aspx

It most certainly does NOT state that

"CafePress.com will not
represent ownership of any of your designs."

...in the new agreement. Quoting the old agreement at me does nothing to address the seriousness of the NEW agreement. Especially in 6.3 when you state you will have "perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive right and license to use such content (or any portion thereof)" and you will do so "with or without identifying the content as yours."

I'd call that theft. If you use something of mine and do not credit me, you're stealing and you're violating the rights of me as the content owner. You are also diminishing the identifying brand association/trademark of my image and diminishing it's uniqueness.

People do not use your service so that you can take their images and use them for whatever you see fit, bringing in income for your company with no authorization required, nor compensation made for the usage of their items. They use your service to avoid costly upstart fees pre-printing items. An example: If I took my image to Kinko's to have it printed on posters, Kinko's would have NO RIGHT to reprint my image for their own marketing, for their advertisements, and certainly not without identifying that the image is copyrighted to me without payment or compensation of any kind. This, however, is what your new Terms of Service is saying. And that's theft. And it's wrong.

The Reply - which offers to make wording changes to the TOS (yes!)

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 16:15:55 -0700
From: "Maheesh Jain" <mjain@cafepress.com>
To: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>
References: <00c701c32abd$aee42a40$0f00a8c0@corp.cafepress.com> <3EDE2D1F.8060902@giveneyestosee.com> <00f101c32ac3$874d3840$0f00a8c0@corp.cafepress.com> <3EDE79AB.1090201@giveneyestosee.com>


Hi M!

I actually went ahead and referenced the old member agreement because that is what you are pointing to on your Web site at http://www.giveneyestosee.com/say-no-to-cafepress/. Sorry about that.

With regards to the new agreement - we have no problem in specifying that members own the content they upload to CafePress.com (as we have no intent to "steal" it as you imply). I will make sure that the revised agreement with this language is put online within the next 24 hours. An explanation of the clauses below follows:

6.1: This clause specifically focuses on the rights of ownership to the CafePress.com service (trademarks to our logos, artwork etc.)

6.2: This clause specifically focuses on the content you upload to our Web site to be sold (ie your artwork, music, or book content). It states that you are merely providing us with a royalty free, non-exclusive license to your content so we can produce and promote your products. Once you cancel your relationship with us, we can no longer use your content.

6.3: This clause specifically focuses on content members put on our message boards and/or submit for our contests. It is independent of the content you upload to sell on our service and has nothing to do with your artwork or the intellectual property you wish to sell using our service. The point of this clause is we may want to republish posts on the message boards in the form of a FAQ, service guide, etc - and it is close to impossible to credit every person posting on the message board - especially since people register under personas and not under their real names. (PLEASE NOTE THIS IS NOT A NEW CLAUSE AND EXISTED IN OUR PREVIOUS MEMBER AGREEMENT under Section 6.4).

6.4: This clause is with regards to the images we create on CafePress.com - specifically the product thumbnails. We've seen people essentially steal our product thumbnails and use them on their Web sites (when they aren't even using our service). This clause states that you can use any of the thumbnails for your products, as long as the use is connected to the service (ie you show a product thumbnail on your Web site to promote your store).

You seem to be confusing the content specified under 6.3 with 6.2. This is simple to clarify and we have no problem doing so.

Please let me know if this makes sense to you and if you have any additional questions. I'll let you know once the new version of the agreement with the clarified language is online.

Thanks!

Maheesh
CafePress.com

Cafepress Email June 5th - Part 1

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 16:07:51 -0700
From: "Maheesh Jain" <mjain@cafepress.com>
To: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>


Hi M,

Mind if I send you the revised language in our Member Agreement before we post it to make sure its understandable? Just want to make sure the revisions are more understandable!

Let me know if you can take a quick glance for me.

Thanks,

Maheesh
CafePress.com

June 5th - *New Proposed TOS
Feel free to send your feedback - POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE - to me and I will forward it to Cafepress.com staff
webmaster (at) giveneyestosee (dot) com

Subject: Re: confusion regarding copyrights and cafepress
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 17:02:33 -0700
From: "Maheesh Jain" <mjain@cafepress.com>
To: "giveneyestosee.com" <giveneyestosee@giveneyestosee.com>


Cool - thanks for your time.

We're actually looking at clarifying much more than this - but the initial revisions would include:

New Section 1.10 (definition): 1.10 “Shopowner Content” means the images, artwork, audio, video, trademarks, trade names and other data uploaded to the CafePress.com media basket.

New Section 6.x's:

6.1 Regarding the CafePress.com Web site: CafePress.com will solely and exclusively own all intellectual property and other rights, title and interest in and to the CafePress.com Service, and CafePress.com will have the sole and exclusive right to obtain trademark and copyright registrations, patents and other protection therefor, and you will not acquire any right, title or interest therein, under this Agreement or otherwise.

6.2 Regarding Shopowner Content uploaded to CafePress.com for sale: Shopowner retains all rights to the Shopowner Content uploaded to the CafePress.com Media Basket. You hereby grant to CafePress.com a royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, right and license to use Shopowner Content in connection with the advertising, promotion, production and sale of the products and services you choose to sell in accordance with this Agreement. If you or CafePress.com terminate your account, CafePress.com will cease its use of the Shopowner Content within 90 days of the termination.

6.3 Regarding Content Submitted to the CafePress.com Message Boards: You grant CafePress.com the world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt, distribute and publish any content you post/upload/contribute to the CafePress.com message boards, for the purposes of displaying such information on CafePress.com and for the promotion and marketing of the CafePress.com services. However, CafePress.com will not resell, attempt to resell, or otherwise convey these rights to any third party.

6.4 Regarding Product Thumbnails and Other Artwork Generated by the CafePress.com Service: You may only use images and artwork created through the CafePress.com Service in your Shop or to promote your Shop or the CafePress.com Service. Any other use of such images and artwork is strictly prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained from CafePress.com.

Any feedback is appreciated!

Thanks,

Maheesh
CafePress.com

I'm compiling my thoughts on it here.