Many people don’t read the service agreements in the services they use. Hopefully Dan Covington’s post at Kansas Business Attorney will make you think twice the next time you use an online service for your client’s files. Acrobat.com has been offering an online collaborative site for lawyers and other professionals to upload documents and work in an online environment while creating and editing PDF’s. However, it seems Adobe’s service reserves the right to share your data with its partners. As Dan says:
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 Contentâ€:
…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.
Thanks Dan for the heads-up on this extremely important issue to lawyers using Acrobat.com.