Adobe is suffering considerable external and internal backlash over their convoluted terms of service update. The one whose plain reading says they get to take ownership of your IP without compensation.
Last week, Photoshop and Substance 3D developer Adobe stole the headlines for all the wrong reasons, getting battered by everyone and their mother for the unpopular General Terms of Use updates, which forced users of Adobe products to provide the company with unlimited access to their projects.
For context, as per the company’s new TOS, they reserve the right to employ automated and manual methods to access and view your creations, a clause many believe the company exploits to gather a large amount of data for training their AI models.
Moreover, the controversy brought attention to section 4.2 of Adobe’s TOS, which states that users grant the company a royalty-free, sublicensable license to “use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate” their creations, cranking the public outrage up to 11.
As reported by Business Insider, which obtained Adobe’s internal Slack discussions, the company’s workers appear to be siding with regular users, voicing complaints about the TOS updates and the resulting backlash, as well as Adobe’s poor communication and apparent mishandling of the situation.
“If our goal is truly to prioritize our users’ best interests (which, to be honest, I sometimes question), it’s astonishing how poor our communication can be,” wrote one Adobe employee. “The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to f*** its users.”
Photo: Smartworks Coworking
“Let’s avoid becoming like IBM, which seems to be surviving primarily due to its entrenched market position and legacy systems,” another member of staff noted.
“Watching the misinformation spread on social media like wildfire is really disheartening. Still, a loud “F*** Adobe’ and ‘Cancel Adobe’ rhetoric is happening within the independent creator community that needs to be addressed.”
The report also indicates that staff have been instructed to avoid directly addressing the current TOS, but rather to refer concerned users to Adobe’s recent blog post, which promises to clarify the controversial points and update the disputed clauses by June 18, yet fails to specify how the Terms of Use will be revised, leaving many users still unhappy.
“At Adobe, there is no ambiguity in our stance, our commitment to our customers, and innovating responsibly in this space,” reads the blog post. “We’ve never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update. That said, we agree that evolving our Terms of Use to reflect our commitments to our community is the right thing to do.”
Photo: Smartworks Coworking
Remember when corporations—at least their PR people—used to talk plainly like normal people instead of space aliens that just landed?
Seriously, Adobe’s statement has enough qualifiers to mortgage a whole neighborhood.
Folks are attributing Adobe’s recent blunder to greed. And that’s likely a factor.
But the depth and breadth of tone deafness on the part of corporate leadership is a newer phenomenon. And it’s spread throughout the permanent managerial class. Everyone from middle management on up now sounds like a kindergarten teacher with a psych BS givingt a TED talk.
The Cancel Adobe movement is acting like this is a bunch of Gordon Gecko types going “Software monopolies are for broke billionaires. Trillionaires do covert IP theft!”
If only.
Nope, the real problem is much worse and more insidious. Because the 1980s corproate raider types knew, on some level, that they were screwing over their own people to make a fast buck. They told lies to hand wave away their sins. But on some level, they knew their behavior was destructive.
The current crop of rootless mercenary rent seekers really do think they’re doing the right thing. They don’t see the customers as “their people.” Ever since the managerial class converted en masse to the Death Cult, they’ve beomce an aloof, isolated culture apart from the rest of us.
Nor are incompetence and malice mutually exclusive. Keep in mind that not only has merit-based promotion fallen into disfavor in the corporate world, it is now illegal in many jurisdictions.
Combine a weird, alien, insular class of managers and executives with a magical thinking cargo cult, and it makes sense why megacorps brazenly violate property rights, planes burst into flames on takeoff, and the ice cream machine is always broke.
The bad news is there’s no dislodging these wacko Death Cultists until their perches of power collapse under them. So it’s gonna get even more interesting soon.
Good news: Indie and open source make it easier than ever to divest yourself of megacorp spyslop. Cut the cord. Go independent today.
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I know someone relatively high up in the management of a heavy machinery firm (I won’t name which one, but you’ve heard of it.) He told me about several anti-consumer activities by his company, and he was all in on all of them.
Some really were motivated just by greed. For example, he told me about how they would have lobbyists push for completely pointless safety features, like having two pedal brakes. They would convince local governments that these features were essential, and wouldn’t you know it only his company provides that feature on all their machines, so they get the bids. Sometimes the influence went the other way; for example they made subpar electric variants just because they could get the government bux (but internally they had doubts about whether these would continue to sell for more than five years or so.)
However, when it came specifically to opposing right to repair, he did show the isolation you are talking about. His attitude was “what makes the customer think that they can modify OUR machines, just because they purchased them?” It wasn’t really about getting additional money from forcing customers to use only “trusted” mechanics or forcing them to buy a new machine after an update breaks the one they have (though those are certainly side benefits.) The attitude was instead that customers are not people that are being served by the company, rather customers are peons who should be grateful to have access to what the company is providing and who have no rights to complain about things not doing what they were supposed to.
I didn’t detect a lot of woke influence in the conversation, though we got into this about three or four years ago so a lot could have changed since then. However, once you have an organization that no longer sees itself as providing an actual real world purpose, there’s no way to resist a woke incursion when it inevitably happens.
D. Cal
June 17, 2024,
There are three types of corporations in current year America:
– “We’ll sell it to you, but we won’t care about supporting it after you give us your money.”
– “We’ll let you use it if you pay us a monthly subscription and/or finance the absurdly high purchase price, but we’ll only support it if you can defeat the AI that we ‘trained’ to replace our human tech support.”
– “Burgers?”
Wiffle
June 17, 2024,
“His attitude was “what makes the customer think that they can modify OUR machines, just because they purchased them?” It wasn’t really about getting additional money from forcing customers to use only “trusted” mechanics or forcing them to buy a new machine after an update breaks the one they have (though those are certainly side benefits.) The attitude was instead that customers are not people that are being served by the company, rather customers are peons who should be grateful to have access to what the company is providing and who have no rights to complain about things not doing what they were supposed to.”
This attitude is where communism and capitalism overlap. When the corporatist era began to dominate life in the West in the early 20th century, most intelligent observers were of a “pox on both houses” attitude. The system and the survival the institution/idea/product matter more than the human that will actually use and want/needs the product or service. That statement is true of both socio-economic constructs.
Many modern corporations also were started by the equivalent of religious figures who happen to be good at making money/growing their business/generally showing a disregard for humanity along the way. A corporation is a group of people working towards a common goal, and it’s not always to make money or help humanity. It doesn’t surprise me necessarily that Walt Disney or Steven Jobs have a cult like status. What is odd is that most modern observers don’t get exactly who it is they are spending time admiring.
BayouBomber
June 17, 2024,
Question is will artist go back to Adobe after the so called corrections? The biggest point needs to be made that Adobe knew people thought they were an evil company and still moved forward with their TOS decision. Such pride and vanity deserved to be punished.
I say let Adobe burn. Let artists reclaim their dignity and their creativity by doing business elsewhere.
The GrillerCons were patting themselves on the back today on the anniversary of their PR victory over Bud Lite. Never mind that they’ve scored no significant wins since, and Bud’s parent company has recovered from the boycott.
Software is different because Photoshop has open source alternatives not owned by Adobe. But we’ll see.
bayoubomber
June 17, 2024,
God be willing, artists become the next major demographic to detract. It’d be huge. One can hope.
Bizarro Man
June 21, 2024,
About twenty years ago, the dominant publication layout software was Quark. Its interface was clumsy to use, and incorporating graphics files was complicated. Updates were few and failed to address well-known problems. Documentation was opaque and unhelpful. To top it off, user help was almost nonexistent and the general attitude of the company towards the customer seemed to be, “Why bother? They have nowhere else to go.”
Layout pros complained for years about Quark, until Adobe introduced its competing software, InDesign. InDesign’s interface was intuitive and easy to learn, it incorporated graphics files easily, and it worked seamlessly with Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator. Its customer support was excellent, too. Quark’s customer base evaporated overnight.
Now that Adobe dominates the market, it seems to be repeating Quark’s mistakes in its attitude towards customers, and inventing new ways to callously exploit them. However, unlike Quark, Adobe’s success is not dependent on a single product. It offers a multitude of photo editing, vector graphics, Web design, video, animation, and other media software products, all well-integrated and inter-operable.
The problems with Adobe’s competition are that they tend to have more difficult interfaces, don’t offer Adobe’s all-encompassing product package, and can’t keep up with Adobe’s feature innovations. Until they can up their games in those respects, Adobe will be able to keep on abusing its customers.
Eoin Moloney
June 18, 2024,
Aren’t they already infamous for their terrible subscription practices, to the point where they’re being sued? Man, so many modern companies use this awful “default to an automatic subscription renewal with a deliberately hostile cancellation process designed specifically to be as inconvenient as possible to encourage you to give up and keep paying” model. Fun fact, I just learned that if you completely delete your account with Kaspersky, it still doesn’t cancel your subscription to them!
I know someone relatively high up in the management of a heavy machinery firm (I won’t name which one, but you’ve heard of it.) He told me about several anti-consumer activities by his company, and he was all in on all of them.
Some really were motivated just by greed. For example, he told me about how they would have lobbyists push for completely pointless safety features, like having two pedal brakes. They would convince local governments that these features were essential, and wouldn’t you know it only his company provides that feature on all their machines, so they get the bids. Sometimes the influence went the other way; for example they made subpar electric variants just because they could get the government bux (but internally they had doubts about whether these would continue to sell for more than five years or so.)
However, when it came specifically to opposing right to repair, he did show the isolation you are talking about. His attitude was “what makes the customer think that they can modify OUR machines, just because they purchased them?” It wasn’t really about getting additional money from forcing customers to use only “trusted” mechanics or forcing them to buy a new machine after an update breaks the one they have (though those are certainly side benefits.) The attitude was instead that customers are not people that are being served by the company, rather customers are peons who should be grateful to have access to what the company is providing and who have no rights to complain about things not doing what they were supposed to.
I didn’t detect a lot of woke influence in the conversation, though we got into this about three or four years ago so a lot could have changed since then. However, once you have an organization that no longer sees itself as providing an actual real world purpose, there’s no way to resist a woke incursion when it inevitably happens.
There are three types of corporations in current year America:
– “We’ll sell it to you, but we won’t care about supporting it after you give us your money.”
– “We’ll let you use it if you pay us a monthly subscription and/or finance the absurdly high purchase price, but we’ll only support it if you can defeat the AI that we ‘trained’ to replace our human tech support.”
– “Burgers?”
“His attitude was “what makes the customer think that they can modify OUR machines, just because they purchased them?” It wasn’t really about getting additional money from forcing customers to use only “trusted” mechanics or forcing them to buy a new machine after an update breaks the one they have (though those are certainly side benefits.) The attitude was instead that customers are not people that are being served by the company, rather customers are peons who should be grateful to have access to what the company is providing and who have no rights to complain about things not doing what they were supposed to.”
This attitude is where communism and capitalism overlap. When the corporatist era began to dominate life in the West in the early 20th century, most intelligent observers were of a “pox on both houses” attitude. The system and the survival the institution/idea/product matter more than the human that will actually use and want/needs the product or service. That statement is true of both socio-economic constructs.
Many modern corporations also were started by the equivalent of religious figures who happen to be good at making money/growing their business/generally showing a disregard for humanity along the way. A corporation is a group of people working towards a common goal, and it’s not always to make money or help humanity. It doesn’t surprise me necessarily that Walt Disney or Steven Jobs have a cult like status. What is odd is that most modern observers don’t get exactly who it is they are spending time admiring.
Question is will artist go back to Adobe after the so called corrections? The biggest point needs to be made that Adobe knew people thought they were an evil company and still moved forward with their TOS decision. Such pride and vanity deserved to be punished.
I say let Adobe burn. Let artists reclaim their dignity and their creativity by doing business elsewhere.
The GrillerCons were patting themselves on the back today on the anniversary of their PR victory over Bud Lite. Never mind that they’ve scored no significant wins since, and Bud’s parent company has recovered from the boycott.
Software is different because Photoshop has open source alternatives not owned by Adobe. But we’ll see.
God be willing, artists become the next major demographic to detract. It’d be huge. One can hope.
About twenty years ago, the dominant publication layout software was Quark. Its interface was clumsy to use, and incorporating graphics files was complicated. Updates were few and failed to address well-known problems. Documentation was opaque and unhelpful. To top it off, user help was almost nonexistent and the general attitude of the company towards the customer seemed to be, “Why bother? They have nowhere else to go.”
Layout pros complained for years about Quark, until Adobe introduced its competing software, InDesign. InDesign’s interface was intuitive and easy to learn, it incorporated graphics files easily, and it worked seamlessly with Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator. Its customer support was excellent, too. Quark’s customer base evaporated overnight.
Now that Adobe dominates the market, it seems to be repeating Quark’s mistakes in its attitude towards customers, and inventing new ways to callously exploit them. However, unlike Quark, Adobe’s success is not dependent on a single product. It offers a multitude of photo editing, vector graphics, Web design, video, animation, and other media software products, all well-integrated and inter-operable.
The problems with Adobe’s competition are that they tend to have more difficult interfaces, don’t offer Adobe’s all-encompassing product package, and can’t keep up with Adobe’s feature innovations. Until they can up their games in those respects, Adobe will be able to keep on abusing its customers.
Aren’t they already infamous for their terrible subscription practices, to the point where they’re being sued? Man, so many modern companies use this awful “default to an automatic subscription renewal with a deliberately hostile cancellation process designed specifically to be as inconvenient as possible to encourage you to give up and keep paying” model. Fun fact, I just learned that if you completely delete your account with Kaspersky, it still doesn’t cancel your subscription to them!
Yes, the government is suing them over it.
Rare government W