Caterpanda

Hi,

I'm looking into this POD service, Online Shirt Stores. They look promising, but I was reading their Terms of Service and I'm a bit leery of this clause:

-------
5.3 Derivative material
Subject to clause 5.2, Subscriber shall own any Intellectual Property Rights in any original material that it authors, designs or creates using the functionality provided by the Website. In consideration of the authorisation granted under clause 4.1, unless Subscriber owns a registered Trademark over the subject material and the Subscriber has provided with written notice as such, Subscriber hereby grants to an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, world-wide licence to do all acts and things (including to authorise other persons to do all acts and things) comprised within the said Intellectual Property Rights.
--------

(Italics mine.) The words I put in italics bother me. So even if I own my designs, in principle they could also take those designs and sell them themselves?

Has anyone run across similar clauses in other Terms of Service agreements? Am I being overly suspicious? Is it not as bad as it appears?

I'd like to know if this is something to be wary of, from the more experienced businesspeople here.

Thank you very much!

 

Reply With Quote

xeacon

I sent an email to online-shirt-stores.com (OSS) about your question and have not received a response (or acknowledgement of receipt).

I've revisited the TOS after your post and found it was missing information. For example, my TOS that pops displays:

Quote: 4. 's Obligations

This doesn't make sense and appears to say that the TOS has most likely been copy/pasted from some other source, but key values such as would follow the "4." above haven't been added correctly. My initial concerns are two-fold:
1.) What have people signing up to online-shirt-stores.com actually agreed to?
2.) What will happen when the TOS is changed after people have already signed up using the existing, incomplete version?

I've notified OSS about the above TOS issues and have yet to receive a response or any plan of action (or, for that matter, acknowledgment of the issue).

I really am sad. I think online-shirt-stores.com looks very promising and could be a great fit for me. Still, I'm finding more and more things I'm uncomfortable with (such as simple spelling mistakes, HTML issues on the main OSS page, etc.) before even setting up my shop. While this may not speak directly for quality of the actual product, I think it does speak very loudly as to the overall quality of OSS, which, to me, has been disintegrating rapidly over the past few days.

Right now, I'm taking a wait-and-see approach (although, it's been more wait at this point) before taking any further action. At this point, the price of the product at OSS is keeping me interested, but that too can change.

I'm hoping OSS can come through for me and you and any other hopefuls.

 

Reply With Quote

Caterpanda

I did hear back from them. They said that someone else had this same issue with the TOS, so they changed it to read:

"5.3 Derivative material
Subject to clause 5.2, user shall own any Intellectual Property Rights
in any original material that it authors, designs or creates using the
functionality provided by the Website.
By uploading Designs to a public gallery on the Site or creating
Designs with OSS design tools, you grant the following licenses to OSS
in consideration of the authorisation granted under clause 4.1: the
nonexclusive, worldwide, transferable, sublicensable right to use,
reproduce, publicly display, sell, and distribute the Design in or on
Products and in advertising, marketing, samples, and promotional
materials for the purpose of promoting the Site and Products; and the
right to make modifications to your Design as necessary to prepare
your Design for use in a particular Product category if you agree that
your Design may be used in such category."

They sent me this text via email, and it is on the User Agreement page on my OSS store as well.

I'm building a shop there now, not sure how it will go. I have a CafePress store as well. The OSS system isn't as easy to use as CafePress; the image sizes for the different items aren't clearly stated as with CP and the mock-ups aren't as nice. OSS has its quirks but I am sticking with them for now.

 

Reply With Quote

thesm2group

Guy, I have had a store with them for the past 4 months and am planning to close it and move to another POD as soon as I can. I would seriously recommend going with someone else if you can. If you would like more specific reasons, let me know and I will post when I have time, but suffice to say they leave a lot to be desired.

 

Reply With Quote

Caterpanda

Quote: Originally Posted by thesm2group Guy, I have had a store with them for the past 4 months and am planning to close it and move to another POD as soon as I can. I would seriously recommend going with someone else if you can. If you would like more specific reasons, let me know and I will post when I have time, but suffice to say they leave a lot to be desired.

May I know why you are closing?

Thank you very much!

 

Reply With Quote