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Comment by gibolt | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine how many art/film creators just lost their current/future livelihood. This stymies the growth of so many individuals, some of whom may have eventually migrated to the U.S. and applied their extraordinary skills to support its economy.

Pirating looks like the only option, if that is even still possible with all of the features now tied to the cloud.

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How many of them can actually buy a license with a national average salary of $17 a month?

This is a legitimate question. Even in developing countries that have much higher average income, paviating software is still super prevalent in commercial companies.

Depends how much CC costs in Venezuela - SaaS makes it a lot easier to have big geographic pricing differences.

This affects ALL of their products. Adobe has a huge suite of free/trial/student tiers as well, which also are rendered unavailable by this decision.

Students will still have access to the software via other means as usual, the real impact would be on cloud services I guess

> Will still have access to the software via other means as usual

Piracy? Surely this doesn't count as a "solution". Just because you can evade a ban doesn't mean that they "still have access" - I mean they do but it's not legal.

Agree is not a "Solution" but it does not has the impact that most people are imagining.

I am just curious, what would be the right way for companies to tackle this, how would they know who is the family of a regime official for example? Most people's comments seem to be aimed at Adobe instead of the complexity that is dealing with this executive order.

> but it's not legal

Not in the U.S., no, but is it illegal in Venezuela? They are under no obligation to recognize U.S. copyright claims. Or any copyright claims, for that matter. And why would they, given that the U.S. is enforcing sanctions against them?

I was wondering this yesterday too - Is it stealing if it's not for sale (so there is no lost revenue)?

My gut reaction is that if Venezuela is apart of any of the international trade laws then it'd still be illegal but there's essentially no way in practice you'd get in trouble for it (Assuming you're a Venezuelan citizen and you aren't like blatantly selling it in the street or something).

It's not "stealing" regardless of whether the software is for sale. Whether it's illegal in Venezuela is a question of local Venezuelan law. If Venezuela is part of a treaty which requires them to enforce copyright laws then they can simply withdraw from that treaty; it's unlikely that they would be benefitting much from it at this point. Or, without withdrawing altogether, they might be able to get an international ruling that voiding U.S. copyright claims within their jurisdiction is a justified response to the U.S. trade sanctions—other countries have succeeded in that approach before. (I forget where but IIRC it had something to do with U.S. restrictions against online gambling, which is a lesser provocation than this general trade embargo.)

Many venezuelans work online because of this very issue. So, probably, many.

I think it's fair to say that people living in Venezuela have bigger problems than access to Adobe products.

They live in an extremely socialist country with crippling economic worldwide sanctions, massive inflation (300,000% or something like that). Their own money is worthless and most use US dollars to transact business.

Yeah, tell that to the freelancer who works from Maracaibo and uses US dollars to import the necessary stuff from Colombia, be it medicines or even food.

If I were venezuelan I'd just pirate the software and avoid this nonsense.

Realistically, that's what will happen, and thank God for piracy.

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