I visited one of my favorite digital scrapbooking web sites and noticed they were having a sale, so I looked up the few things I have been absolutely drooling on for the last month or so, put them in my basket and talked myself into going ahead and spending $8. As I moved through the checkout process, I stopped to read the Terms of Service. It’s generally a good thing to do so when buying digital files like brushes for Photoshop or fonts and such. I decided I don’t need to spend $8 there. In fact, I don’t ever need to buy anything there. Any retail establishment run by creative people who are THAT clueless about copyright law, don’t need money from me.

I could go into detail and tear the TOS apart sentence by sentence to point out the completely ludicrous beliefs these people have about copyright law and copyright violations, but I’m too grumpy about not getting to enjoy some shopping therapy (and new Photoshop files) to feel like bothering. Let’s just say I would advise all creative types and all those who plan to use purchased files from other creative types to create things themselves should learn all about copyright law and read any Terms of Service they run across very carefully. While it often annoys me how very little your average human knows about copyright law, it outright disgusts me when a business in the business of helping people create things knows so very little about it.

I’d email them and suggest they have a lawyer look over their TOS, but they claim to have already done so. Methinks their lawyer is as clueless as they are … or, you know, they didn’t get a lawyer to look at it at all.

Oh well, I’ll guess I’ll just go do the housework now and save myself some money I didn’t need to spend anyway.

I took a moment to read their commerial use license as well. It’s just as clueless.