Hello my friends.  I’m back and I come bearing a gift.  One that will secure your Terms of Use policies so mischievous minds can’t change them.

Do You Know the Purpose of a TOU?

The TOU policy is one of the most important tools used by digital scrapbooking artists. The purpose of this legal document is to serve as a contract between digital art designer and customer. It describes the acceptable uses and unacceptable uses for the digital art products it pertains to.

I Learned the Hard Way

For a while, I did the same thing most designers do, I distributed my TOU via a plain text file. However, that’s not really secure and it left me without any legal recourse if someone decided to change it. For me it’s important to create a secure document - one that can’t be changed by anyone once I have finalized it. What good is a legal document if it can be easily manipulated by the customer? It didn’t take but for one sour-grape event before I changed the way I was doing business with my TOU’s. Now I distribute my digi-art with TOU’s in a PDF format.

My Solution is Secure and Free

I highly recommend you distribute your digi-art with TOU’s in a PDF file. This format offers several benefits:

• PDF files can be viewed using the free Acrobat Reader software, accessible from the Adobe website at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/ .
• You can create secure files that can not be changed, and without any additional costs to the artist or the customer by using PDF converter software.
• PDF files can include both graphics and text, making it easy to use the Standardized TOU Initiative icons to simplify and clarify the document terms.
• These documents can also include hot-links. Hot-links are live hyperlinks that connect customers back to a websites with the simple click of their mouse.

Visit the New STOUI Website!

I have a full tutorial on how to do this posted at the new Standardized Terms of Use Initiative website.   I’ve also loaded a printable version of the tutorial in PDF format.  This training file includes screenclips as well to help illustrate the steps.  The site still has a couple pages that need to be populated.  But we already have most all the training materials ready to view and this one is an important one to get in the hands of our fellow designers… as soon as possible!

Check out the Creating a Secure TOU training page today and learn how to prevent the same mistake I made with an unsecured document.

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