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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Back in high school, my best friend wanted to have a legal copy of Photoshop (we were broke kids and pirated everything back then). He eventually found a copy of Photoshop 2 on eBay for cheap, got it and it's CD key and then purchased the upgrades to eventually get to Photoshop 5. I think he was able to pull it off for under $100 or pretty close (I think it retailed for like $300~$400 back then?).

I too miss when you owned a copy of the software, licensed to a single machine, that was on a physical transferable medium. Jetbrains at least allowed a fallback license, which Adobe doesn't have (and honestly that's because Jetbrains couldn't get away with that shit with a tech focused customer base).

Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

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> I too miss when you owned a copy of the software, licensed to a single machine, that was on a physical transferable medium.

I only purchase music on CDs and vinyl. In each case I legally have the right to listen to the music forever, and even can sell the album if I tire of it.

Digital downloads are not that way at all and because of that I will never buy one. Likewise with ebooks.

I also will never personally purchase software on a subscription model.

Why are digital downloads not similarly 'forever'? Do WAVs and MP3s have DRM capabilities? Asking legitimately - for any new vinyl that I buy I use the download codes that come with albums rather than ripping them manually, as it's very convenient for e.g. listening at work.

There’s nothing wrong with digital music from a “keep it for life” perspective, as long as you’re on top of your backups.

WAV and MP3 do not have DRM capability. Even music purchased through iTunes has been available DRM-free for a decade [1].

For example, I’ve got a lot of albums, bought through Bandcamp, which I downloaded as FLAC and burned to CDs. Same quality as a retail CD, and no one can take it from me without physically stealing it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store#Digital_rights_ma...

>Same quality as a retail CD

Not the same "overall" quality, to be honest. Burned CDs have much shorter life.

but since he owns the 100% digital copies this ain't a concern, he can burn them again (not very ecological TBH, I've would rather put it on some big storage player)

In each case I legally have the right to listen to the music forever

In many jurisdictions, you still have that right. You just have no legal way to exercise that right.

This is not crippling any businesses in Venezuela. Anyone using Photoshop has already been pirating it because it's ludicrously expensive relative to local wages. They are instead being crippled by the barely functioning and heavily rationed power grid, food shortages, hyperinflation, etc.

If he bought it off eBay, it's not a legal copy in the USA. Software is licensed, not sold; and software licenses are nontransferrable.

It might have been an unopened box... I did something similar with an old copy of Adobe Premiere that I got on clearance for a couple of bucks, then upgraded.

Right of first sale overrides that, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Of course, the person selling the software would be in trouble if they put the physical media up for sale without deleting all local copies.

Vernor v. Autodesk essentially removed the right of first sale for shrink wrap licensed copywritten works.

That doesn't seem to be the case since 2009: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=148be5c9-c0d4... (or at least it was properly tested then)

Has anything changed since then? It seems Adobe CC was created not long after, so... maybe not a coincidence?

That decision was overturned on appeal. Vernor v. Autodesk was the specific case I had in mind.

Thank you for the reference! It was quite eye-opening.

This is the Wikipedia page about the case (to make it easier for others):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc.

A (somewhat) serious question: since Autodesk, Adobe, etc. can use Shrinkwrap/Clickwrap/Browserwrap to distinguish between a sale and a license what's stopping users from doing it right back?

What if my browser sent custom headers to Adobe saying that by serving me a webpage Adobe has agreed to sell me, not license, a copy of each new edition of any software they release for $1 in perpetuity and that a breach of contract would result in liquidated damages of $10,000 per undelivered copy.

If I'm bound by Adobe's Terms of Service before I've had a chance to read them by nature of the my browser's request then surely Adobe would be similarly bound to my Terms of Servers(TM) by nature of their response?

Wouldn't work, as custom headers are not reviewed by a person at any point.

You're not bound until you have had the opportunity to review the TOS. Meaning that merely accessing a page from somewhere else (i.e., a link or url) isn't enough--but once you're on (or revisiting) their website, if you interact with it in any matter beyond visiting the TOS page the TOS would apply even if you chose not to read it.

Adobe licenses are transferable. Here is their support page for people who want to transfer software licenses from one person to another:

https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/transfer-...

> (we were broke kids and pirated everything back then)

Why brag or joke about that? And why does it matter if you were 'broke kids'?

> Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Do you understand what is going on here? Adobe is complying with a government order. And the government issued it in order to achieve an objective in a country where I believe (I only know what I see and read) there are significant problems.

> All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Apparently they have no supplies in hospitals and rampant inflation. They have much bigger issue than piracy and malware.

> Why brag or joke about that? And why does it matter if you were 'broke kids'?

You may have been reading too far into this. It sounds to me like a statement of fact, not a brag or a joke.

> Apparently they have no supplies in hospitals and rampant inflation. They have much bigger issue than piracy and malware.

Having a job is part of the solution, and the use of software is part of many jobs that have international value (i.e. from countries whose currency is not inflating rampantly).

Don't pretend like the US government has a good justification for this. It's purely another attempt to destabilize the country even more.

The entire purpose of these sort of sanctions is to hurt the public enough that they start putting pressure on their government to make a change that the sanctioning government wants. In this case the US wants Venezuela's government to be replaced with one who would be more friendly to US oil companies taking all of their oil and paying a small portion of it's value to the politicians who allowed them in.

The main reason Venezuela has been solvent up til now is that they have a lot of oil, which the government sells and uses to pay for social programs. But since the price of oil went down they've been having some money trouble. Combine that with the fact that Maduro knows as much about monetary policy as Trump knows about tariffs and you've got a deflating economy that's only made worse by sanctions, which again, is their entire purpose. They are specifically trying to ensure that Venezuela's government collapses so that US companies can move in and rob the region of it's resources.

Don't get me wrong, the best thing Venezuelans could do is probably throw Maduro out on his ass, but replacing him with some US-friendly bootlicker is worse than no solution.

As a Venezuelan I disagree, I can tell you that the people here dream of the day when a US military intervention takes place and the US(or really anyone not communist) take the country.

Mh that is not really my experience of talking with Venezuelians in Colombia. At all. They sure want Maduro out but certainly don't want the US in, that would be the recipe for ending up like El Salvador in 10 years.

What a coincidence I'm in Colombia too, Anyway I'm not saying that everybody wants to be a US colony but that is a better alternative than the status quo.

I can tell when you don't have electricity, gasoline, water or food anything is an improvement.

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