Help me to do the right thing. Please!

I’m a professional digital scrap-booker and I march with you as a fellow digital art creator in the fight against piracy. Among all of your customers I am probably the most likely to actually read your terms of use. And if I don’t understand anything in your TOU file I am more likely to contact you for clarification. I want to respect your time and effort in creating your artwork as well as the time and energy that went into creating your terms and keeping your products updated with current TOU documents. But I have almost 400 of these documents to read through and comply with and the vast majority of them are vague or don’t even mention professional uses of their products. Some of the terms I’m asked to comply with may seem quite reasonable to you but in the reality of a typical scrap-booker’s workflow they comprise an accounting nightmare.

An example of this is the request that I not use a kit for more than one album without contacting the designer, or repurchasing the kit, or paying some kind of fee…etc. Now…is that if I use one element once on one page of a client’s album? That kit is now off limits until the condition is satisfied? Is it once per file within the kit and I must track every file used for every layout for every client and if I want to reuse a paper, or a staple…then I’m responsible to follow through with the TOU’s instructions? How about using said kit for one client/project? Any file in said kit or at least some percentage of files in the kit? Can you see how much easier my life would be to just forget the entire idea and find other supplies with fewer provisions to satisfy? I want to do the right thing but I’m also in business and want to earn money.

Among my almost 400 TOU files are at least 350 different sets of terms. There are dozens of words and/or phrases with several possible meanings or unclear definitions to decipher. And almost all of them state that the designer can change those terms at any time and it’s my responsibility to confirm the veracity of each document before I use the product. The vast majority of these documents are unsecured txt files rather than pdf’s which protect you from changes made by dishonest customers and protect me from being accused of being a dishonest customer. And for some reason I cannot comprehend, the mere mention of any effort to standardize TOU’s raises hackles and ticks designers off. Even asking you to standardize the definitions of the terminology used in your documents seems to be taboo. Wouldn’t it be infinitely easier for your customers to comply with your TOU if they understood them clearly and didn’t have to guess what you meant? I would think that positive result would be well worth whatever sense of individuality you may feel you are giving up by joining with your fellow designers in deciding on some standard TOU sets or styles.

At this point I have concluded that my business interests would only be served by buying from designers who allow unrestricted professional use without extra licenses or fees. If I knew just a little more about designing I wouldn’t buy at all, just design custom papers and elements for my client’s albums. Is the loss of my business enough to make a difference? Probably not. There are a lot of other professional scrappers though who feel this way too…and this segment of the industry is growing fast. Is our business, as a group, a significant portion of your sales? I don’t know. Ultimately it is up to you to allow scrap-for-hire usage, to charge fees, or to completely forbid it. And that’s fine…I’m not trying to twist anyone’s arm. I would just like your terms, whatever form they may take, to be clearly defined and laid out in a pdf document. I would like you to respect my time and effort as a professional digital artist by keeping things easy to understand. And I would like you to think about issues of workflow and what constitutes reasonable effort on your customer’s part to comply with your terms when composing them. That’s all. Help me do the right thing…just tell me what the right thing is…please!