Re: Kodak's secret plan to compress photos at its EasyShare W eb site?

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Fergie wrote:

> Yeah, I saw this yesterday on Engadget:
>
>  http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/29/kodak-accused-of-compressing-pics-to-save-space/
>
> I'd be pisseed, too. :-)

Pissed at losing your job, were you in Maya Raber's position?

Or pissed that Kodak may have "messed with" your digital images?

The latter is an entire red-herring far too many are getting all heated 
up about (probably won't stop the publicity hurting Kodak tho...).  
Apart from it being incredibly obvious good common sense, the Kodak 
EasyShare Gallery ToS:

   http://www.kodakgallery.com/TermsOfService.jsp

spells it out for the more dense:

   3.   Availability

   ...

   [bold] You agree that Kodak Imaging Network shall not be liable to
   you for any modification, suspension or discontinuance of the
   Service. You are responsible for creating backups of any content you
   post to the Service. [/bold]

   ...

   22.  Responsibility for Your Images

   You are responsible for all of the images you upload, share or copy
   using the Service.  ...

And probably elsewhere -- they were the ones that just "lept out at me" 
as I scrolled down the page.

Finally, I note (from some specific-term searching) that Kodak appears 
to NOT make any claims that it will store your digital photos binary 
identical to the uploaded images, or, in fact, in any other way.  If 
you read what Kodak offers, it seems clear that they make NO assurances 
about image quality issues whatsoever, so its customers probably have 
no strong grounds for complaining on that issue.

It would be "nice" if they assured you that they wouldn't mess with 
your images, but they don't and as they and the terms of service their 
customers agrred to accept in using the service are based in the 
"developed" country with about the worst consumer protection laws on 
the planet, it is also probably not reasonable to argue that Kodak's 
lack of mentioning image quality should mean that you have a natural 
right to assume that they would protect the quality of images uploaded 
to this service...


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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