Adobe has just changed the terms for subscription applications like Photoshop. Nothing big, just a demand of unlimited use of everything you ever create, forever. Oh, and you’re locked out of your existing work until you agree.
A change to Adobe terms & conditions for apps like Photoshop has outraged many professional users, concerned that the company is claiming the right to access their content, use it freely, and even sub-licence it to others.
The company is requiring users to agree to the new terms in order to continue using their Adobe apps, locking them out until they do so …
Adobe says that its new terms “clarify that we may access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review.”
The terms say:
Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos
If you’re using our tools, we get unlimited rights to anything you ever created on our tools for any purpose forever, plus we get to sublicense them. It’s as if Microsoft announced that it was publishing Joe Schmoo’s Misery II: Misery Harder because Stephen King agreed to the license agreement for Word 4.0.
Designer Wetterschneider, who counts DC Comics and Nike among his clients, was one of the graphics pros to object to the terms.
Here it is. If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files – it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted.
But don’t worry! It gets worse! You can’t access your server-stored work or even uninstall the app until you agree to the term!
Concept artist Sam Santala pointed out that you can’t raise a support request to discuss the terms without first agreeing to them. You can’t even uninstall the apps!
I can’t even get ahold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand.
I can’t even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms?? Are you f**king kidding me??
But don’t worry! Adobe has “clarified” that they’re really not going to steal your content, despite the terms and conditions clearly giving them the permissions to do precisely that. They also swear up and down that they’re never, ever, ever going to use your work to train AI on, despite the fact that we all know that’s exactly what they’re doing.
All of this points out how stupid it is to rely on a subscription model for your software.
Is there a Louis Rossmann rant on the subject? Yes. Yes there is.
Until Adobe actually changes the terms and conditions to provide the narrow permissions they claim they actually need (like the ability to create thumbnails), no one should agree to their terms. And not allowing someone to retrieve or delete their data without agreeing to draconian terms and conditions first is unconscionable extortion.
Expect lawsuits.
Tags: Adobe, Louis Rossmann, Media Watch, technology, terms and conditions, video
Expect lawsuits.
1: Expect a massive class action lawsuit
2: Expect individual lawsuits demanding an immediate injunction freeing people to pull all their information out of Adobe without agreeing to those terms.
Some of #2 ought to be filed by today
3: The health care community ought to be going ballistic over this. Because I expect there’s a fair amount of PHI in Adobe products.
It’s times like these when I really wish I’d become a lawyer
[…] ACTUALLY WORSE THAN I THOUGHT WHEN THE NEWS BROKE LAST WEEK: Adobe Just Wants Unlimited Use Of Everything You Create. “Adobe has just changed the terms for subscription applications like Photoshop. Nothing big, […]
Exactly. I filed a risk assessment request with my IT department today. I work in a major university health system, and there is a very strong probability that proprietary, protected, or private data is contained in Adobe‘s cloud. That includes patient images, patient PHI, scientific data from unpublished manuscripts and patent applications, and all sorts of other private information. In fact, our information security policy requires that we cannot use AI if it requires giving AI access to proprietary information, without a specific contract with the AI company guaranteeing privacy protections. Now Adobe wants to grab everything. I don’t see how Adobe cloud services can pass the minimum security requirements at our university.
This is not the first time Adobe has insulted and outraged customers over their grabby license terms. They need to fire all their outside lawyers and shoot all their inside lawyers, plus all the executives who _hire_ those lawyers.
Adobe subscriptions cancelled.
It is the only thing that will change policy.
I started getting out of Adobe products a long time ago, about the point where I noticed that they were getting greedier and greedier for more and more money while the software just got a lot worse in terms of actual performance.
At one point, I had my own copies of Acrobat, InDesign, and Pagemaker that I was doing government work with because Uncle Sam wouldn’t pony up for the software. Spent the money for full licenses, only to realize that they were moving to a de facto subscription model, which was about when I quit buying their bullshit. You’d get the upgrade product, and discover that the interface had changed, there were minimal improvements, and the actual performance was way, way worse.
Adobe had a good lineup of products, there for a bit, mostly bought up from other companies. Sadly, once they bought them, the quality and utility of said product usually dropped drastically as a value proposition.
I miss PageMaker. It was an excellent tool that did what you wanted it to without getting in your way.
There’s a special hell for the executives of companies that specialize in buying other companies up in order to get their quality products… And, then turn them into utter shiite.
Coca-Cola bought one of my favorite beverage companies, Odwalla, and then just casually decided to shut it down. Things like that ought to be illegal; if you’re buying a company, you shouldn’t be able to just shut it down because you want to… So far as I can tell, Odwalla was still making money when Coke decided to get out of the fresh juice market. You rather get the impression they bought it simply to keep alternatives to Coke and other soft drinks from developing market share.
I rather dread what’s likely coming for Topo Chico, now that Coke owns them.
Ah, well… Such is life in our diminished age.
[…] From the Battleswarm blog, HERE. […]
[…] BattleSwarm Blog; […]
holy hanna. well folks, hoping all you big time users ABANDON these software ‘bikers’ by the thousands, drive their stock price down to the point they get picked over like some hacknied grade schooler trying to ‘get in the market’
RE: Pagemaker.
I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft Word was a really nice simple easy to use word processor on the Mac. (I’m old enough that I bought one of the very first generation Macintoshes for an obscene price.)
Then desktop publishing happened, and Microsoft vomited out MS Word 3.0 as a Frankinsteinian abortion of word processor and desktop publishing program. MS Word has been an over-optioned pain in the ass ever since.
Word on the PC has always been an abomination.
I never screwed around much, with Wordstar, but Wordperfect was a reliable product whose toolset could not be beaten. I have memories of an I Corps exercise wherein we had every Pacific Rim base sending representatives to participate, and the sheer insanity of how many different programs the US Army was using was slapping us in the face. Hard.
Only way we got through being able to work with and unf*ck the resultant documents was to pull everything up in Wordperfect, do a reveal codes, and go to town editing everything to at least be printable. The worst formatting came from Alaskan commands, because they’d somehow managed to standardize on Macs and were using a mix of Word and whatever the hell was proprietary to Apple at the time.
Swear to God, if the Second Korean War had lit off any time in the early 1990s, there’d have been a full chapter in the updated “This Kind of War” discussing how FUBAR we were because of intercommunication issues resultant from everyone having different office software… If you’d have had someone tell you how much of an issue that could be, you’d never believe it.
However… It was. I’m pretty sure that you’d have been able to attribute actual casualties down to how FUBAR things were, with regards to the documentation. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, until someone notices that all the tables are misformatted, putting the wrong column of grid coordinates for targets under the wrong heading…
I’d be curious to know if any of the various “Blue-on-Blue” fatalities from Desert Storm and Somalia might be down to interoperability between different software packages that different commands had purchased… I do know that the Ranger Regiment came back from Somalia and about had a minor war with the Fort Lewis DOIM over the fact that 2/75 was not on the same sheet of music with Regiment and the other Ranger battalions.
Thankfully, that idiocy damped out by about 2000, and we were all type-standardized on Windows and Microsoft Office. If nothing else, that at least meant we were all dealing with the same product… You ain’t lived until you’re trying to work out WTF was going on with a document file at three in the morning during a TOC jump, and the submissions for the OPORD aren’t playing nice with each other…
Ditch PhotoShop and go open source with GIMP.
It can’t do everything PS does, but many will find it suitable.
Lawrence: Thanks for pointing out the ill effects of Adobes new update. And relevant comments. They have to ask permission to publish our Adobe stuff. It should be not difficult to work out the documentation to do this. Ok for you to publish my comments. Dick
I can’t even tell you how many years I have just continued to use Photoshop CS6 because I own the software outright. Sure there are some new abilities in later versions that would be nice to have, but I refuse to give Microsoft subscription/blackmail money.
[…] Some interesting updates on Adobe. When last we checked, Adobe just wanted unlimited use of everything you create forever, and you have to agree to those terms before you can …. […]