Adobe Warns Users They Can Get Sued If They Use Old Photoshop Versions (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Warns Users They Can Get Sued If They Use Old Photoshop Versions (2019)

techthelead.com

56 pointszac23or31 comments

This is a 2019 article. It says they can possibly get sued by third parties, which was conveniently omitted from the headline. Dolby is the third party.

> Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.

I don’t know if this ever happened and I really don’t know why someone submitted it to HN 4 years later

There's been a "how's it going" meme making the rounds using just the headline from this article so that's probably why it's catching peoples' attention

“By third parties”.

It sounds like Adobe is sending this out on behalf of Dolby, whose licensing terms were only valid while the version of Photoshop was supported.

It’s a bit ridiculous that the lawyers wrote a licensing agreement like that, but I really wouldn’t worry about this as the end user. Just a bunch of lawyers stepping on each others toes.

Just another reason to avoid Adobe products if at all possible. And one less reason to pay them if the licensing is badly managed to the point that you paid and you’re exposed to liability that only Adobe had the visibility to manage.

This is why I like the JetBrains approach: you're entitled to a permanent license of an older version based on how long you've paid (presumably it matches up with the cost in a non-subscription model)

I don't hate subscriptions; it's great approach from a cash-flow perspective. (I remember when a Photoshop license meant shelling out $700). However under that model no one kept paying year after year unless they wanted new features.

Wait, I still have physical CD install disks for Photoshop 6 that I still use on one of my older computers. Is this saying that even if I purchased the software years ago on a physical medium, I can’t use it anymore?

It may be saying that, but, historically, Adobe says a lot of things. I cannot imagine that Dolby would risk actually taking their users to court on this basis.

It's saying it may violate third party copyrights. Check your license agreement if you have any concerns.

You purchased a license, not the software. What does the included EULA say?

Next question, if Adobe's license with dolby became retroactively invalid, they might have done the IP equivalent of selling stolen goods. This might make you a pirate even if you have no way to know it.

Morally, you're probably in the clear. Legally, you're in 'interesting case' territory, so lawyers can make you bleed for years. But that's basically always the case for just about any IP on this planet, so the question is basically: Are you worth the bother for Adobe or Dolby?

As a persistent user of an outdated and pirated version of photoshop, I suggest Adobe go fuck itself. Their cloud services download for subscription use of Lightroom almost acts like malware once you install it in your PC, and it's surprisingly hard to remove even if you erase pretty much everything related to Adobe Cloud in your PC and then cancel your subscription completely. Aside from that, it runs in the background constantly (while being hard to uninstall) and you have to repeatedly, manually deactivate all of its little "services". With all that crap being piled on, just pirating a part of the software is simpler and hardly a major moral qualm considering how this and other software companies often treat their customers.

Adobes cloud crap runs the cpu like it’s mining bitcoins. It’s always doing something, you checking for updates every 30seconds? Yeah like some of their products but because of this, I have uninstalled it and finding a lot of alternatives

As if there's been a compelling reason to use anything past Photoshop 7, feature-wise...

It sounds you haven’t used anything past Photoshop 7 then, which I must remind you came out in 2002. First thing that comes to mind is content-aware fill, which came out 8 years later in CS5, if I remember correctly.

Depends on the use case. I've moved to lower-cost options like Pixelmator, but I'm not a professional designer.

Adobe sent this:

>Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties

And users like the ones who posted those tweets read that as Adobe themselves wanting to sue them. Says a lot of the mental capacity of some people.

What does Dolby have to do with images and editing of images? Is this extended to Adobe Premiere?

I have an old airgapped system and still using some old version of photoshop once in a while but have to change system date to run it since it's expired.

Find me, collect evidence and sue me. Good luck!

There's a number of interesting video games which only had limited rights to the soundtrack they used, and thus went out of print. Blur (2010) was a great adult-mario-kart racing video game, for example, with a great sound track, but it's been unpurchaseable for years, because of that sound-track. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blur_(video_game)

As far as I'm concerned, in the imaginary sane world, I say if any users were to get sued by Dolby, then it's Adobe on the hook for that.

The fact that Adobe tries to make this a you problem instead of doing whatever they have to do to make good on their own obligations tells you all you need to know about Adobe, if you didn't already know many times over.

Do people still pirate copies or is it all cloud based now?

people still pirate copies

Adobe, Jet Brains, etc, download the actual binaries, and just call home. Piracy would involve disabling/bypassing those checks, which I assume exists. (Been out of that world for a while, but I remember the good ol' days of warez via IRC and FTP)

There are activation cracks for the creative cloud suite.

I still use CS2 which was made "free" by Adobe for a time (they shutdown the servers) but fortunately got archived and mirrored by a lot of sites.

"Consumers don’t truly own the software they buy it seems"

It's a license. Has always been. A license that may change at any given time.

2019?

I've been using CS3 for ages, come at me bro.

Doesn't Adobe want people to become familiar with their tools, regardless of legality, so they continue to use them later in the workplace?

Of course but they're not going to assume liability of it.

good news is most older versions of photoshop are at parity with the latest versions of Gimp.

Bad news is this type of communication can be perceived as strong-arming, and only serves to load more coal into the boilers for projects like Gimp.

That sounds less like "bad news" and more like "other good news".

Come get some!

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