Well! Adobe updates its Terms, says it is allowed to scan your files.

[thewayne]

This change happened February 17. And, of course, you have to agree to the change in order to continue using the product that you're paying for a subscription to, it's not like you own it or anything. In Adobe's words, they're doing it to prevent child exploitation.

"Adobe's reasoning for giving itself the right to comb through user content is the detection and removal of illegal content, such as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, as well as abusive content or behavior, including spam and phishing."

Ignoring that people do work under NDAs. Or on secret government projects. Or with student records. Or with medical records. Or with actual exploited children. Etcetera.

Alton Brown just tweeted that his company is suspending all use of Adobe products until his attorneys can go over the user agreements with a fine toothed comb.

One content creator complained that he couldn't get ahold of an Adobe spokesdrone, nor cancel and uninstall the software, until agreeing to the new terms.

While I use Adobe products at work, I'm not really using them at home: my operating systems have aged past my ancient software. I do need new photo editing software and a good PDF creator/editor package, though. Shouldn't be hard to find, Adobe's PDF editor has been increasing in suck factor.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/adobe-defends-terms-of-service-changes-amid-gen-ai-explosion/

Comments

[dewline]

Yep. I'm sticking with Affinity and Inkscape for the foreseeable.

[richardf8]

"suck factor." I believe the precise term - given to us by Cory Doctorow - is "enshittification."

[thewayne]

Cory is definitely the leader in applying correct terminology.  I've been reading him for ages, just rearranged my ebook library of his stuff.

[disneydream06]

You show 'em Alton. :)

I always figure if somebody is snooping on my computer usage, at least at home, I hope they enjoy my porn.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[garote]

There are versions of Photoshop, Lightroom, and Audition that several groups of collaborating hackers have denuded of all online connectivity. They're all several years old and run in translation (Rosetta 2) and require Little Snitch, but they exist.

I'm old enough to remember a world before DRM. I'm old enough that I was already a veteran of the computing world when Big Steve made his announcement that he was deliberately stripping the DRM from all the music that Apple sold, because, as he pointed out, DRM weakened the experience for legal purchasers of music but did nothing to weaken the experience for pirates, making it a step backward in the competition with them.

It is absolutely no coincidence that Apple started a streaming service hopelessly tangled in DRM and revoking the entire idea of "ownership" four years after Big Steve died. He was already richer than hell before he returned to Apple. He wanted to do something other than maximize profits: He wanted to not be an asshole. His passing opened the way for the mindset of "We're big enough to get away with it, so we're doing it, period." "Don't be an asshole" was a philosophy for sentimental suckers.

And so, welcome to a world where you own the physical device outright, but you pay a monthly fee just to have certain software sitting on the device, even if you don't use it at all. It's kind of like that line from Ducktales: Scrooge goes forward in time, and his nephews have all turned into fat assholes after taking over his company, and they create what they call a "privilege of working for us tax," in order to claw money back out of the wallets of their own employees.

Adobe is a late-stage Dwarven empire. They're delving too greedily, and too deep. The freakin' FTC Balrog needs to come stomping in, any day now.

[thewayne]

I remember software with no to minimal copy protection, it's pretty sad.  Just today I was cleaning up my new adds to my music collection: CDs that I'd ripped to highest definition MP3.  I find it perplexing and amusing how often Apple Music cannot find the correct cover art: you have the artist name, you have the title of the album.  Jethro Tull's Aqualung is not the correct cover art for J Tull Dot Com, etc.  Yeah, it's a pity that corps are in it for every dime they can get from us and don't care whether or not they're asses about it.

[garote]

TBH I've found it's easier to go find a lossless rip of a CD I already own on the internet, than to rip it myself. It takes seconds to drop the name into, e.g., Soulseek, and then dump the result into XLD.

That said, I still do patronize a number of artists on Bandcamp because I dig what they do.

For a long time I thought "there's got to be a backlash at some point," since I imagined that music streaming services were quietly siphoning the wallets of an entire generation. Then my nephews pointed out to me that the music industry is being hollowed out by artists that I've never heard of using distribution channels I've never thought of. Good on 'em. The key thing is the fragmentation: There is basically no longer a music industry. Musicians are distributing digital content in ways that compensate them and at no point is a rights-managing record label involved.

[thewayne]

I've used Bandcamp on a few occasions to find background music for videos that I've made, being careful to use the correct license.  And also to find cool music.  It's a great resource, I just hope they survive.

[motodraconis]

I'd heard that Adobe were scraping artists work without their consent for AI and burping out "in the style of" pages. I was assuming this was stuff saved on the cloud, surely they are not scraping your computer itself?

Ah, it is stuff on their cloud. I never use that. Years of working with NDA's in the Games Industry, even if it is a constant battle with Adobe to reject this default!

[thewayne]

That is an excellent question.  If it's stored in their cloud, I would think they have a right to scan files stored there.  And I definitely will never store files in their cloud.  If they are scanning files on your computer, that's a clear computer intrusion.  I don't think they can license their way into that.

[motodraconis]

I read through the link you posted, and it said this.

Adobe says that it only scans files on its cloud service and not on users' PCs. According to the software giant, "Adobe performs content analysis only on content processed or stored on Adobe's servers; we don't analyze content processed or stored locally on your device." That verbiage has not changed.

I don't use any of the AI and fancy processing gewgaws of Adobe, so I think I am outside their remit.

[thewayne]

I do recall their File Save dialog is pretty insistent on saving to their cloud, you have to go to some lengths to save locally for Photoshop.  Not so much for Acrobat.

[thewayne]

Excellent cartoon!  Yeah, I save locally.  I'll do backups to OneDrive - and to attached devices.  But I never do primary saves to cloud storage.  My Windows PC does scheduled backups to a second hard drive inside its case.

[lovelyangel]

So far things are OK, but options continue to be reduced. I have the Affinity suite of products, but Affinity's acquisition by Canva could lead to subscription pricing down the road. I use both Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo; they are quite close in functionality, although Photoshop's generative fill and upscaling are in a league by themselves.

There aren't many alternatives to Adobe Lightroom. I tried Capture One years ago, and it didn't click with me – so I stayed with Lightroom. Since then, Capture One is leaning harder into subscriptions, and Lightroom continues to make strong improvements. (e.g., Capture One vs Lightroom)

I can't even put my Lightroom catalog/source files in the cloud as it's too expensive. I don't want to anyway. There is nothing in my Lightroom workflow that even attempts to put my files in the cloud. So for now, I'm safe. Nonetheless, change trends are not positive with regards to AI scraping.

[silveradept]

It's always a question as to whether the changes in the Terms do more than what the company says they'll do with them. After all, we have discovered some very interesting things in terms of what the Terms actually do let companies do with our data and our materials, and when we complain, they can always say "well, you agreed to the Terms when you installed/started using the software." Never mind that there are no meaningful ways of saying "I will use your software, but I will do so according to my own Terms of Service and you will have to accept that" or "I do not agree with your Terms of Service, and I would like to negotiate with you about which clauses are acceptable to me and which ones are not." Since there are no meaningful choices in the matter, I would like some court to rule that all such force-upon-the-user contracts are void. Because while Adobe says they are only doing these things now, they won't have to change their Terms again if they decide to expand uses in the future, and there will be no reasonable recourse, apart from stopping using the software and demanding that anything that's yours that's still in Adobe's possession is deleted immediately and securely.