Adobe Assholery Explained
Is Adobe's ¢reative $uite/¢loud actually claiming ownership of all the stuff you create with their tools? If so, what can you do about it?
Y’all are gonna make me do it, aren’t y’all. Defend Adobe, one of the most monstrous software-and-technology corporate entities in existence. All because of a popular misreading of their clickware Terms & Conditions.
First of all, let me state that I am licensed to practice law exactly nowhere on Earth—and yet, along with the rest of you of the age of majority and presumed competence to click-sign the fifteen documents we all have to in order to participate in modern society, I’m required to understand every legal document that whooshes past my face with an “AGREE” button at the bottom. So I give it my best shot.
…even though I know it’s 100% the same situation as Sumerian continuing as the language of liturgy, literature, and science until the first century CE for a certain geographical region, and even more so the same deal as Latin being used exclusively in the Catholic church until the middle of the last century so that the largest division of Christians on Earth would need to retain the services of a priesthood (via cash money and extorted obedience) to translate and interpret their daily relationship to the Divine for them on the threat of inadvertent damnation.
In the end, though, legalese is just a stilted and formal dialect of English, which I have mostly mastered. The grammar and syntax take few liberties. The usage of terms tends to the archaic. But end the end it is a programming language—which means it’s possible for it to be poorly written and buggy, sloppy and obfuscated, or “algorithmically challenged” with parts that do nothing and never get executed, or when executed do entirely unexpected things.
Never forget that a legal document is a program for people to execute. Lawyers specifically, but others, when they sign a contract, are required to execute the program as well … in whatever way their personal untrained-and-buggy internal interpreter dictates.
This programming language is only taught to the wealthy, to the children of the powerful, and to a handful of scholarship kids who are discovered to have the knack. This helps the powerful retain their power, and it’s all a crock, and like the Latin mass it needs to be abolished.
Specific to the claims flying around that Adobe is saying that they own the shit you create:
This is not the first time a software company has been accused of making this claim. It hasn’t even been five years since the last resurgence of this furor from other sources. But the root source of the misinterpretation is the same: fucked-up copyright laws.
So let me explain it again.
Until you say otherwise, YOU own the exclusive rights to publish copies of your creative work. EVEN AFTER YOU HIT “POST” AND PUT IT OUT THERE IN THE WORLD.
But when you hit “Post” you yourself aren’t printing copies and handing them around. Your (extorted, clickware) agreement with the site you post on grants a nonexclusive license for them to make a theoretically infinite number of copies and send them everywhere in the world where they’re allowed to operate and show them to … whatever set of people you have theoretically chosen. This is the end result you want, supposedly, if you’re a user of social media.
Because of the inherent global fucked-upness of copyright law, social media companies feel that they need to click-extort this right from you in order to cover their asses, even though it’s YOU setting viewing permissions and hitting “Post” on a post-by-post basis. It’s because no social media site is considered to be a “common carrier” and can be held responsible for content they didn’t write, and … other stuff like that. They assume via clickware legal bullshit that you’ve given them the license to actually post your crap when you hit post, and that’s pretty much that.
Adobe’s monstrous monolithic Creative Cloud Network has a “Share” function that lets you allow colleagues and your end-clients access to the stuff you make and store on their “cloud”, and that clause that everyone is freaking out about is what they think they need to force you to agree to in order for them to provide access to the people you want to give access to your work. And they feel they need that extorted license to be transferable to third parties because they might hire a third party to write/host/maintain that sharing network for them, since such software is clearly outside of their in-house field of expertise.
And that’s pretty much the end of the issue with that one particular clause that people have been sharing screenshots of on all of the social media sites. I’m not saying their legal code doesn’t have bugs and backdoors and trojan horses elsewhere. I’m just saying that’s not one of them. I’m saying that it’s what they feel they need to include in their T&Cs in order to do exactly the thing you probably want them to do when you try to share your work with other people.
I mean, it’s not like Facebook click-extorting the right to show your face and photos and text and personal data to anyone and everyone their unmonitored and unmoderated algorithm chooses, outside of your personally hand-picked network, in their insidious and insipid “Do you know this person? Do you want to? Maybe you should connect!” suggestions/attempts to reconnect you to old stalkers you thought you’d blocked and shaken off your tail.
Anyway, that’s enough of me defending Adobe. I can’t stomach any more of that. If you’d like a more legitimate reason to hate them, please allow me to continue.
As if you could stop me.
My largest beef with Adobe is that once they discovered that they’d mysteriously gathered to themselves a huge enough chunk of the market share for digital artwork and layout—in which end-users were now requiring that collaborators share their work among themselves in Adobe’s proprietary formats—they changed their business model in a way that no longer allowed struggling creative types to own their own means of production.
Thus turning the bulk of the freelance creative industry, by stages, from farmers into migrant sharecroppers.
You no longer own your tools. You have to lease them from Adobe with a monthly or annual payment that you have to hand over to your new software landlord no matter how much money you’re earning from your output.
The rent you pay to your fief in tons of veggies doesn’t depend in the slightest on how much you were able to harvest this season.
If you work on the Adobe Creative Cloud, you no longer own your farm. If you miss a rent payment, you will get locked out of your fields of crops-in-progress and even from the marketplace where you distribute your own goods to your own customers.
Failure to adhere to their click-extorted Terms & Conditions, as interpreted by their own whimsical lawyers and corruptible executives, can unilaterally get you kicked out of your own shop even if you make all of your payments.
And of course Microsoft was mere minutes behind them in their “Hey, Let’s go back to the Feudal Landlord model!” innovation, both with the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite and then, as soon as they could manage it, their operating system.
If you are a creative business owner, it’s a huge risk to put your all of your eggs in the proprietary software basket. If you’re close enough to the edge, it might be a mistake to put any of your valuable eggs in those baskets.
And it’s not like their “it’s okay to be shitty because we own the whole market” software hasn’t crashed out from under me a number of times destroying untold hours of work, back when I was forced to use it.
Allow me to mention free, full-featured alternatives like Scribus (publication layout) and Krita (digital painting) and Inkscape (digital illustration) and GIMP (image manipulation and retouching) and the LibreOffice suite (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.). I’ve used all of these packages and they work exactly as expected—although GIMP still needs a little help working in the print-friendly CMYK-derived color-spaces and needs help that is freely available from Cyan.
Sharing networks might be harder to recommend since not only do you have to pick one for yourself, you have to convince your clients and collaborators to use them as well. But that’s a discussion worth having.
If you are a creator anywhere near your financial edge, do not let these feudal entities force you to rent access to the tools you use for producing your livelihood. And don’t give them the power to lock you out of your own shop.
Especially if your country is at risk of turning into an authoritarian nightmare and a single edict can make it illegal for them to do business with you on the off-chance you might be a dangerous subversive.
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