It’s not 24/7 or anything close! In the UK it’s business hours – Monday to Friday 9 am to 5pm.

Adobe would be doing themselves and their customers a BIG favour if they did provide live 24/7 support even it meant that calls would be transferred to another region when their local office is closed.

80% of the problems come from 20% of the users.
(we suspect it’s an even higher % of problems from an even lower % of users)

In terms of piracy, 80% of the piracy is probably done by 20% of the pirates.

There is no question that piracy is a serious problem for anybody that produces any sort of product based on intellectual property-be they software developers, record companies, film studios or even photographers. The big question is what to do about it.

The US Constitution grants authors the exclusive right to benefit from the results of their intellectual property. In fact, it’s the only “fundamental right” found in the original Constitution–the Bill of Rights was added later. And while you are free to debate the relative merits of one system vs. another system of protection, there should be no question of Adobe’s rights to take steps to protect their intellectual property.

For any “creator” to take issue with Adobe’s rights is the height of hypocrisy. Copyright protection cannot be a “sometimes it’s ok and sometimes it isn’t ok” proposition. To allow that would jeopardize the entire institution of international copyright protection.

If you, as an artist, wish to enjoy the benefits of copyright protection for your work, you cannot deny Adobe’s copyright protection for theirs.

Any comparison of Photoshop, or any other intellectual property, to an item of “tangible property” is therefore flawed from the onset.

Thanks.

Trivializing the impact of piracy and overplaying the impact of activation on a few users who are actively messing with their systems in unsupported ways doesn’t serve any need in a positive way that I can tell. Of course I wish Adobe could get the answer right for each and every case. But no company is ever going to be able to do that, and I think Adobe does better than most. And at some point if users are going to shoot themselves in the foot, there isn’t much you can do to stop them, much as we’d like to.

For the few users who had real activation problems – and I tried to help as many of those as I could on the U2U forums – I believe the activation code in the new release fixes the problems. There will probably still be issues for a few users due to exceedingly rare system issues, and again, we’ll try and help those users on a case-by-case basis.

But piracy is way too big a problem, and activation is the best effective solution that causes the least number of problems that we currently have available to us.

To support this scheme coming to the Mac people such as Mr. Rodney have been badgering people every time they said a word against your plans and commented on past failures in this area. In addition you have denied and downplayed the problems you have had. A good example in this discussion is Partition Magic. You say “Most PartitionMagic operations do not affect the activation state of the machine.” Well that may be true but since you don’t say which operations do affect the activation state, i stand by what I said, Partition Magic will/did break the scheme on Windows, and you should know that. Furthermore there is no default policy for Adobe to reactivate products and you state clearly that you may well NOT reactivate, in some cases putting the user who paid 600USD or 1000USD for some products in a position where they lose their money.

More and more companies have found that rather than do the hard work of finding and prosecuting pirates it is easier to devise ever more complicated schemes to get traditional users to pay more. This was the reason given by your VP of Anti-piracy for going after ‘casual copiers’, it is easier. Apple devised a family pack. 5 licenses 200USD because they knew that is how households used software and would want to buy. Your volume licensing scheme is unintelligible and none of the retail outlets have multi-packs available for any of your products. [I did not have time to search hard for this, I'll have somebody do that over the next few days, but I could not find anything other than your volume licensing page and as I said that was unintelligible and had no prices.]

You expect users to adhere to your policies and be upstanding individuals and respect Adobe. Yet you have done nothing to provide guarantees to the user. You have made no commitments to your users. The EULA is all about what the customer is legally bound to do for you and says nothing about the commitments Adobe makes to the user. Your FAQ in places reads like a weasels charter, in other places it is great. But make it legal and be clear. Add it to the EULA. Give the user some rights.

Adobe is not alone and the problems with activation are not unique to Adobe. But Adobe is unique in having no apparent competition in many spaces that directly effect the earning potential of whole industries. This places an additional burden on you.

Activation is leading to annual subscription based pricing. Activation fails. YOUR activation fails and in some cases you have not been able to figure out why. And whether Adobe sees it as one instance in one million, the person that is denied the use of his software sees it as one instance and that one instance might be the guys job, a big contract or in some cases their business.

I realize that you were not officially representing Adobe, however I did find your downplaying of the very real issues people have had with your activation scheme(s) nauseating. Maybe you are limited in what you can say, but still. people “suffered”. I have taken time to contact a number of people that complained. I will also contact Adobe for official comment over the coming weeks. I have what I need for my article. Feel free to rebut my comments here, safe in the knowledge that I will not drag this out further, as I said I have what I need.

I appreciate the opportunity offered by PhotoshopNews to have this “debate”.

Yes, as long as they satisfy the rules. See http://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/1001707.html;store

It’s one of the more liberal return policies in the industry.

Note that you can view the EULA on http://www.adobe.com as well (do a search for EULA).

-> Have you worked with Symantec on this release of your activation scheme?

No, but we do test with their products. We also test with PartitionMagic. Most PartitionMagic operations do not affect the activation state of the machine.

-> If a machine has multiple Id’s active will all user id’s be activated?

Yes, activation is per machine. Note that the EULA for the standard end-user package only allows for one instance of the app to be running at once.

-> Did you consider passive network check for other running versions of software prior to going with the activation scheme? MS Office does this, so do many other applications. Why did you choose not go this route?

Yes, we considered it. It doesn’t cover the case of the white-box assembler illegally imaging disks for customers at all, and it also is more problematic (remember, we did use such a scheme on OS 9).

The current version of Office and Windows XP do not use this scheme either; they use an activation scheme very similar to Adobe’s. Note that most people don’t have to activate Office or XP if it comes pre-installed, or a volume license is used.

Volume licensing is available for Photoshop as well, starting at just 5 seats.

You said you wanted people to use the activation scheme before they believe what people are saying about it. I was asking if they could do that without paying for a license. If they cannot, are you saying Adobe will refund money to those people that choose not use Adobe products after they have installed and activated?

Have you worked with Symantec on this release of your activation scheme? I noticed that you caveat the use of disk tools in your FAQ. Are you going to be saying that users of PartionMagic and other tools are not required to Activate or are not supported by Adobe?

If a machine has multiple Id’s active will all user id’s be activated? This is another item that has not been covered in the FAQ.

Did you consider passive network check for other running versions of software prior to going with the activation scheme? MS Office does this, so do many other applications. Why did you choose not go this route?

I’m not quite sure what you are asking. A try-and-buy version of the application will be made available that will work for 30 days or until activated. To actually get to the point where pushing a button will activate the product requires a serial number, which requires a purchase.

-> Can an activated version of CS2 be placed on an external Firewire/USB hard-drive?

Sure. And it will run on the machine it was activated on. Activation is tagged to the machine, not to the installation directory. To move the drive to another machine and run it from there requires de-activating the first machine and activating the second (though doing that with Windows applications doesn’t really work since the required registry entries and other support files will be missing).

-> Has any service level agreements/commitments related to activation been added to the EULA?

I’m not familiar enough with the EULA to answer this.

Smart man! Exactly – this works just as you stated. Like a book is a good way of thinking about it.

I’m sure that you think you do.
I’m also sure that you don’t.

You are bringing up pretty wild scenarios – very, very few people do a low-level format of their drives, ever (folks, formatting from within Windows or OS X doesn’t do a low-level format). And very very few of those do it frequently enough that activation is a problem. And in that rarest of rare cases, it’s a phone call to fix.

As for a boot manager, very, very few users use one anymore – there is vainshingly little reason to anymore. If you still feel a need, just make sure you install that first. Not that hard. Even if you install it afterwards, in most cases it doesn’t not affect activation. You are definitely making assumptions about how it works that don’t apply.

So if even one legitimate user is slightly inconvenienced by activation you consider it a failure? It would be nice if the world were that black and white. This isn’t scraping for pennies, this isn’t shaking down legitimate users. But then I think you already knew that.

So were users inconvenienced by activation on Windows last time around? A few were – very few. And many of those issues have been taken care of this time around. But suffer? That’s an interesting bit of hyperbole.

Can activation be tried without paying for it?

Can an activated version of CS2 be placed on an external Firewire/USB hard-drive?

Has any service level agreements/commitments related to activation been added to the EULA?

Thanks.

Right, if that’s the case then I have no problems with the system. It just wasn’t how I interpreted the license (and how the activation system works).

If what you say is true, doesn’t it negate all the backup laptop issues? Eg. Deactivate your desktop and activate the backup laptop before going out in the field (the primary laptop is already activated). When you return, deactivate the backup laptop and reactivate the desktop.

For those who remember Turbo Pascal you might remember their license. It roughly stated that their software is like a book. It can only be read (nee used) by one person at any one time. This to me makes perfect sense as you are treating a ‘license to use a non-tangible product’ as if you actually ‘purchased a tangible product’.

I know there are some out there who are totally anti-Activation. Nothing I say will change those people’s minds, and so it’s not worth the effort. For those willing to read on:

I did push for bumping the license to three. I’ll go back and push some more. It was looked at, I promise you – it was not just dismissed out of hand. It was felt that the addition of easy activation transfer was sufficient.

So, why Activation? And why do I think Photoshop got it, well, closer to correct than others?

Putting out naked bits just doesn’t make sense anymore when you can download them off of Bittorrent in 10 minutes. Yes, you can argue that a crack will appear within a couple of weeks, why does it matter? Because that cracked version is *different* than what’s on the CD. One has no way of verifying it’s the same, doesn’t carry virus or spyware or other malicious payload, and at upgrade time it’s easy to detect. Shoot, the first crack that came out on Windows last time didn’t even let the keyboard shortcuts work. The kids who just want to play around won’t mind risking that, but most people who use Photoshop to generate income aren’t going to take that chance.

The other major source of piracy is casual. Those that probably don’t mean to, or for whom it’s more effort to not be a pirate than to be one. Small shops with 5-10 employees who didn’t want to bother with a (now very easy) volume licensing program that starts at just 5 copies. White box assemblers for whom just imaging a disk over was too easy not to do. Here is where Activation works, and works well.

So why do I think we got Activation more right than others?

Our licensing was already more generous than most, and we’re just enforcing the license – and in a very minimal way at that. You don’t have to re-activate every so often as in other schemes. You can move activations around. And what we consider a “machine change” requiring re-activation is very generous. It takes all of 15 seconds to activate once, at install.

What problems have we seen? Most problems that cause mysterious requests for re-activation are actually system problems that are quite serious. A dead motherboard clock battery that causes the system time to initially be wrong, for example – this can cause problems beyond just the re-activation. We have had a couple of people with bad drivers (on Windows) that caused the machine to crash at shutdown, causing a piece of the activation information to be out of sync – again, a system problem that is quite serious if not corrected.

I would expect the Mac’s greater stability and lower vulnerability to spyware and other software that can affect system behavior to reduce and practically eliminate these instances of unnecessary (but harmless) re-activations.

So, please, before believing all the FUD on Activation, try it. Or talk to someone who has.

For those who have legitimate reasons to need a 3-machine license, argue for that. It is more common now, and it can be re-considered. But think about whether you really would need to do that transfer constantly, or is one of those machines really just “occasional” and you don’t *need* the third activation. I’m not trying to be dismissive here; I just want you to understand that the argument for bumping the number of activated machines to 3 should be pretty solid.

——————–
-Scott

If you – properly – reformat the hard drive or install boot magic or many other applications that just love that first track, the activation will be broken. If you have a disk fail. That will screw things up too. And Adobe specifically make the case that they might not support reactivation in those cases. But things worked OK for you. Great. What percentage of the user base having trouble are you willing to put up with? 0.5% 1% 10% ? Lets pick a number and see if Adobe/you will commit to it. Honest users are going to suffer and in my mind if one person that is legally entitled to use the software has trouble, then the plan is a failure. How did windows work out for you?

Adobe has managed to gobble up most competitive apps and has enjoyed free publicity via ‘casual copying’ for many years. Now they have a lock on the market and growth is slowing they are going to try and pick pennies in the corners of the market. The fact that they want to do this is fine by me. How they have chosen to do it is wrong. Once competition pops-up they will relax the licensing scheme and reduce pricing substantially, until then with the help of people like Mr. Rodney they will take advantage of their – market dominance – customers a little.

Thanks for the insight on Adobe and the Photoshop team, but I have a pretty good handle on Adobe and what goes into these decisions. Thanks.