Adobe stole my creative suite

Moonrise2473@feddit.it to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 711 points –

One day many years ago I had too many drinks and being stupid and naive and I bought adobe cs5. I still use it on the same computer I installed it a decade ago. Activated and installed only once. Today they revoked the access to it. Clicking the link they say "revoked because purchased from an untrustworthy reseller"

Yeah... untrustworthy reseller, look at the invoice and see who sold&shipped that physical copy...

sold by adobe themselves

Contacted support, they said that they won't do anything about it because it's EOL.

Moral of the story: don't do like me. If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. Never give your money to Adobe.

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Send this to Luis Rossman. He'll have a fieldday with this shit.

Agreed. Definitely send this to Louis. The tirade will be funny, at the very least.

Sent OP’s thread to email on his business’s semi-hidden contact page

(sorry for the spam Louis, lotta us instantly thought of you - hope it translates to some awareness, action, & Adsense revenue)

SEND THIS TO LOUIS ROSSMANN. He absolutely will rake them a new one and companies tend to magically "fix" errors in their favor when people make a huge PR stink about it.

It will help bring Adobe down faster too, because unilaterally revoking previously purchased licenses no matter how old is a great way to lose all trust from your corporate customers.

Edit: also cs5 is universally pirated, this is now your legal perogative to pirate it to retain access to the copy you PAID FOR.

I will say that this is horribly fucked, nobody should have to burn through their 15 minutes of Fame in order to receive the basic goods and services that they have paid for.

It feels even dirtier because OP bought a physical copy, that feels so much more like Adobe broke it at night and stole it.

Escalate it to the EU consumer watchdog, they got some real teeth.

https://commission.europa.eu/live-work-travel-eu/consumer-rights-and-complaints_en

Assuming you bought the Italian version because you're living in Italy.

Best case, you get your money back.

I feel like money back in this instance should also account for inflation.

Nah I think that would be a bit too much. After all OP was able to use the software just fine up until now.

If the company is going to claw it back from him against his will, he should be able to name his own price for selling it back to them.

Then the OP just rented the software.

Adobe should pay more than the inflation-adjusted price - multiples of it, even - so that the repayment is actually punative.

But then those years of 'EU is harming technology evolution' propaganda would be wasted, and we can't have investments like that just go to waste

EU, I belive in you!

They were right, they are an untrustworthy seller.

Reminds me of when all their customer data leaked, and obviously the people who pirated didn't have that issue.

If the program is EOL why do they care if you use it or not? Like fuck thats really a nasty way on making you buy the new software. But you know what? If you are looking for a better version. Translate to Spanish Pirate Artist and you can find it there.

You answered your own question. If OP can't use it, maybe they'll buy a subscription, thinks Adobe.

Super scummy.

My elderly parent had this happen. Hobby is photography. Still used CS5. Boom, gone. Adobe wanted to sell a subscription plan when they called to figure out what happened, which just made them mad.

But now they’re sad and not engaging their hobby because they no longer have CS5.

Too bad I can’t get adobe on abuse of the elderly for this shit.

I like darktable for photography

Darktable if you're ok with a steep learning curve, RawTherapee if you prefer an easier-to-use UI with a few less features.

Ya it's a pretty unique ui and you really need to sit down and take your time to find everything

This is what drives people to piracy. Then they whine about how pirates cost them money.

What's fumny to me is I remember watching a computer show on TV in late 90s they where interviewing an Adobe representative about the new Photoshop 5.0...

The TV host asked what adobe though about pirated copies and the representative said on LIVE TV that Photoshop price was for professional who make a living out of Photoshop and that any hobbyist had nothing to fear about using a pirated copy as it only served to get more people knowledgable about Photoshop and if these started doing business in photography and neede Photoshop they would then pay for it so to not be unprofessional.

I remember this as well. Their whole stance was that they'd get everyone using Photoshop even if people had to pirate it. That's part of how it became the industry standard.

Microsoft low key had the same stance back in the late 80s to mid 90s and it definitely helped cement their dominance.

They didn't whine about it even once here. They whined about their own untrustworthiness, which I can't argue with.

Can’t argue with them there. Adobe is not trustworthy.

This really sucks. As a fellow cs2 user, i switched to krita some years back, perhaps its good enough for your work.

I don't support piracy of Adobe, because you're still using their ecosystem and still supporting it by propagating its use. Just stop using their trash, seriously.

What are you talking about? I am using and recommending krita, lol.

he's piggybacking off your top comment to make his own thoughts more visible. it's what we in the business call a "pro strat" 😎

Affinity is solid, and regularly goes on sale

It's on sale right now and has a 180-day free trial even if you tried it before.

Yeah well until there's another ecosystem that comes even close to being as good, I'm going to continue pirating Adobe. None of the alternatives I've tried have been deserving of the overwhelming praise I see, they're all lacking tons of features that PS has had for years.

This reminds me of the time that Malwarebytes revoked 3 of my perpetual licenses that I bought before they moved over to a subscription model. Sorry, I told them I was never going to stop talking shit about them until the day I die, so I take any opportunity to bitch about it

I have a frozen license with them which they'll reactivate once I give them the receipt information they didn't send me when I bought it from them........

I'd like to see a clickbaity article about this with a title like "Adobe steals product customer paid for, admits they are an ' untrustworthy reseller' of their own products"

OP please forward this email and your story to Louis Rossman

I recently commented about how much I hate Adobe for their horrible subscription tactics, and the fact that the Canadian government REQUIRES you to use Adobe reader to sign PDFs in order to immigrate to canada.

The last time I complained to them, they offered me a free extended trial in order to make things right. I tried to cancel the free trial on July 10th, and was informed that it would cost $100 to cancel my contract.

I don't have enough money to hire lawyers, but I am 100% sure what they did was illegal. I have a severe mental health disorder, which resulted in me trying to kill myself after being literally fucking raped by a company. July 10th is also my birthday, which was fucking great. I fucking LOVE me a good corporation, they bring so much joy to the world.

Sorry for the TMI, I fucking hate this company.

the Canadian government REQUIRES you to use Adobe reader to sign PDFs in order to immigrate to canada

This took a few frustrated attempts to discover for me. Moved to Canada last year and while I am a citizen my wife and kids are not. There was a lot of paperwork to fill out and submit and having repeated issues with documents not opening and seeming not to exist was crazy making. I dont normally install Adobe anything on my computers but decided it was worth a try...

Bright side of the story is that after less than a year the family is now all legal and have their PR cards. The Canadian gov can be refreshingly efficient sometimes.

Canada's kinda a joke tho, were just america cosplaying as europe cause it makes us feel good - but just gives us twice the drawbacks and the rich twice the benefits

(I just want a fucking apartment without going in debt, is that too much to ask)

I mean, they're not wrong. Adobe is untrustworthy, after all.

I would love it if you took them to small claims court on this. We all love piracy, but I would also love to see how that case turned out.

Call me crazy, but this is definitely a ploy to force users who bought their products to pay for Adobe's crappy subscriptions.

This can't be legal, right? Op should contact the BBB

They don't care if it's legal or not. A company of that size can afford to spend money on lawyers that waste the legal system's time until the case gets forgotten. And even if they fail to delay the case to infinity, they'll be fined 0.5% of their yearly profit. It's as they say "the cost of doing business"

OP, Louis Rossmann would love to hear your story. He makes videos about anti-consumer shenanigans like this.

It would appear the installation is in need of a "repair"

I've been pirating Photoshop since I was 14 in 2005, and I've only been proven time and again that they don't deserve my money. Easily one of the greediest, greasiest companies out there.

This happened to me last year. Bought a cs4 and cs5 design suites back when they came out. Only ever used on one computer. When i unauthorized my computer and moved it to a new one they wouldn't authorize it and demanded proof of purchase. I showed those fuckers a paper receipt from 10-15 years ago. They wouldn't accept it and required additional information to verify i was authorized to purchase the software at the discounted price from an authorized retailer. It took several back and forth before they issued a new cd key instead of reactivating mine.

I suspect the cdkeys were cracked at some point and i just had the unfortunate luck of mine being abused. Would be nice if they didn't require online authentication for a product i legitimately own though. If they are going to require online authentication then they need a more secure way of generating their cd keys.

I have a lifetime license from another company that got deactivated for similar reasons, and support is useless because they demand information I wasn't given when buying it from them directly

GenP e ciao

Yep, GenP is what I used for Substance Painter.

There doesn't appear to be a lemmy community for it yet, but the old subreddit is still active.

How are they different to monkrus? Am curious

Monkrus is GenP, but prepackaged into the installer, if I'm remembering the GenP subreddit wiki correctly.

Download the most recent version from Monkrus and call it a day.

Companies always think they can get away with this shit and if the small person in this cast etheric customer tries to fight back the company will bully them until they give up

Once this gets media coverage then they'll shit their pants because they can't stay in control anymore because it hurts their bottom line

Nothing is going to effectively hurt their bottom line, because they own the market. There are no other viable alternatives to Adobe if you are working in the graphics profession. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in graphic design/visual communication uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. If you do any work with designers and receive files from them, you'll need to use Adobe products in order to access the files and all the information in the files.

This is the sector I work in. There is absolutely no getting away from it, and until someone comes up with a product suite that is better right out of the gate, and is completely compatible with Adobe, no one is going to switch.

Even then, it'd take a lot more than just equal quality and compatibility. Folks are too used to Adobe slop to switch.

I've recently started using Affinity instead and ngl, it's getting there. No AI stuff (which is a plus for me), runs better, and is capable of doing damn near the same things.

You really need a critical mass to break Adobe's stranglehold. I hope that someone can, because I hate their software-as-a-service model. But for now, I have to suck it up and deal with it.

Their refusal to pay to integrate PANTONE colors has really fucked up my workflow. :(

Just use Inkscape already.

Inkscape is a vector editor, and OP didn't say whether they used CS5 (which is a suite of different software applications) for only vector graphics.

Inkscape + gimp + Blender

All suites covered?