Comment by sidjor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sidjor | Hacker News Reader

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Not many realize that when you use an adobe product you are giving them a right to conduct an audit of your organization. These are typically fishing expeditions by consulting companies like E&Y. The last time they sent one of these mails - I had bluntly told them their products are crap and we are heavy users of figma.

From https://www.adobe.com/in/legal/terms.html 15. Audit Rights. If you are a Business, then we may, no more than once every 12 months, upon seven 7 days’ prior notice to you, appoint our personnel or an independent third-party auditor who is obliged to maintain confidentiality to inspect (including manual inspection, electronic methods, or both) your records, systems, and facilities to verify that your installation and use of any and all Services or Software is in conformity with its valid licenses from us. Additionally, you will provide us with all records and information requested by us within 30 days of our request in order for us to verify that the installation and use of any and all Services and Software is in conformity with your valid licenses. If the verification discloses a shortfall in licenses for the Services or Software, you will immediately acquire any necessary licenses, subscriptions, and applicable back maintenance and support. If the underpaid fees exceed 5% of the value of the payable license fees, then you will also pay for our reasonable cost of conducting the verification.

"The big-muscle anti-piracy tactics of Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk in India"

https://archive.factordaily.com/the-big-muscle-anti-piracy-t...

It is not unique to Adobe.

It sounds like it's a real problem, but they picked an aweful case study to highlight.

The guy's 30 employees were repeatedly downloading pirated software, and the lesson he learned after the first audit was to quickly delete the software right before the auditors came. I'm not surprised the industry group passed his name around as someone who might plausibly have pirated other company's software.

In my understanding, businesses, in theory should never use unlicensed proprietary software. If they want to cut costs, they should use free software. There are almost always free alternatives, which may or may not lack features available in their paid alternatives. If they badly want those software, they should try to increase their revenue using free software and then switch to paid.

This is pretty standard for B2B software that is licensed at a user or node level or similar.

Yes, but no-one does this without evidence. These terms apply even if you use any of their free stuff like acrobat reader. And even when you trial any of their apps.

Not to mention they stopped doing these kind of audits in US per my understanding. In other countries they still seem to be doing them. There is a whole set of firms to help you with these audits.

> Yes, but no-one does this without evidence

cough nobody mention Oracle cough

I know of zero technical and happy oracle customers. They seem to exist largely because of non technical folks forcing it into an organization due to their incredible sales teams or they have legacy usage from back when they were innovative. If it’s the latter they love to audit to extract as much cash as they can before the organization ditches them.

This is lunacy. First, who signs these types of contracts without red lining that, and second, who's actually ever willingly complied with this? Allowing someone to this level of access to your "records" could cause so many more regulatory issues.

>First, who signs these types of contracts without red lining that, and second, who's actually ever willingly complied with this?

Companies buying software voluntarily accept license clauses about potential software audits -- because they want to use the software.

There are even niche law firms that help defend against software audits. E.g. : https://scottandscottllp.com/autodesk-audits-how-did-autodes...

The rationale for deliberately buying software where the vendor has auditing rights is that the buyer gets more value out of using AutoCAD than worrying about audits.

Audit clauses vary greatly in their ability to enforce. It basically comes down to the ability of each side to push back. Obviously, the more dollars at stake the harder the vendor will push to actually audit. And the easier it easier to replace the vendor the harder the customer will push back.

As far as audit clauses go, I always try to stipulate that the audit is conducted by employees of the client or vendor. I don't want any outside consultants snooping around my IP.

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