Adobe has announced significant changes to its policies regarding access to previous versions of Creative Cloud tools. Since Creative Cloud launched in 2012 it has been possible to use any version of the products, and as features occasionally got removed, some users chose to hang on to the earlier versions. According to the announcement, only the last two major releases will now be available for direct download, and in Acrobat’s case, only the most recent version.
According to a number of posts on social media and forums, this policy extends beyond removing downloads, with some users receiving emails telling them that the use of very old releases is now considered a violation of the conditions of use, putting them at “risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties”. Though Adobe hasn’t elaborated on that last part, in an article on the Register the company mentioned that they “cannot comment on claims of third-party infringement, as it concerns ongoing litigation”. You can read the text of this email here.
Owners of Perpetual licenses for Creative Suite will be pleased to know that their software is still valid and if you purchased a downloaded version, access remains accessible through an Adobe account.
Read the announcement on Adobe’s blog.
So, I’m supposed to stop using After Effects 2014, for 2019, which is still about 10x slower in rendering complex compositions? *sigh* I still have 2014 installed, and it works yet. But I have to wonder if they will update the CC app from giving it a license at some point, rendering it useless.
No better time to learn Fusion I guess…I keep saying that. Maybe I mean it this time. 🙂
Join us in the Fusion promised lands, brother
The key thing here is… did you accepted the CC conditions, licensing and EULA? Then yes… you have to comply and do whatever they want… and you can’t stop paying to show your anger and keep working with your software… because it’s not yours… not only the software, but also the license… not yours…
+100500
Dear Adobe, What the hell?
>an article on the Register the company mentioned that they “cannot comment on claims of third-party infringement, as it concerns ongoing litigation”
Older Adobe software used third party libraries and features (Dolby comes to mind) that they no longer have a license to distribute. I’d assume they just got sued, are going to lose, and don’t want to get sued again.
It does sound like something along those lines. If this is the case though, it’s really surprising Adobe’s legal dept didn’t make their 3rd party licences watertight when they were first planning to move to subscription (or perhaps they were too busy chasing customers for possible licensing infringements).
This is just a guesswork on my part, but maybe Adobe didn’t want to keep paying for some rolling license(s), possibly with escalating fees and little development in return, so they dropped said ip a couple of versions ago? Then the penny dropped for the affected 3rd party that Adobe are still likely deriving substantial income from their now unlicensed ip. If that’s the case, the irony is kind of interesting. Subscription and software as a service is always right for the customer you say? All this is just a hypothesis of course, but the old line ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ could apply to Adobe here.
Also, I imagine some other software behemoth might be looking at this news with interest.
From what I read, they had an agreement with Dolby, that Dolby could audit using a 3rd party any time to make sure Adobe was in compliance with the agreement in the number of licenses used in Adobe’s products sold/licensed to customers. Adobe refused to allow them to do the audit for a few years now. So Dolby accused them of bundling the license into multiple products per subscription, instead of one license per product as was in the agreement. Or not counting the license at all with some customers. They are speculating in the lawsuit, but the only way to know is if Adobe gives the 3rd party access to that info.
Not being able to further distribute it is one thing, threaten the users telling them that they are under license violation and they have to upgrade their software is a different thing… or you think they will write CS6 users and tell them “hey… you paid for this but… you cannot use it anymore”
Cheers!
I’m not sure but the message to users sounds like they are trying to demonstrate to court an effort to remedy the infringement and to mitigate the argument against them.
I can’t see them ever writing to CS6 users such a message because any agreement they had with 3rd parties at the time would have been under the well established perpetual license model. In effect I’m guessing for each version of CS they bought the equivalent of a perpetual license to distribute the 3rd party ip with that version of CS alone. At least I hope that remains the case because I use CS6!
Don’t worry, AFAIK they can’t touch your CS6 licenses 🙂
And yes, it may be the case, it’s just the side effect of rental licenses, since you don’t own a license everything they have to do will affect you, from price rising to legal problems or agreements they may have.
Cheers.
Other than Muse, which is now being killed off by Adobe 🙁 I’ve found happiness with the products below as replacements. I feel like it’s probably a losing battle, but I’m moving away from anything with an SAS model, including 3ds max. I let my maintenance plan expire last month. That was a tough one.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/
Total concur. Got my Autodesk “[90-day Renewal Notification]” (i.e. do this or else!… aka threat mail) for the studio seats over the weekend.
To be honest, I would be happy to pay the XXk+ but the tone of the email is so OBVIOUSLY threatening; so why the “F” would I maintain that relationship – when for LESS I could become a top tier sponsor of Blender (by almost an order of magnitude).
Luckily we are currently animating a project about escaping abusive relationship at the moment, so I should be fine 😜
They need to marry with Autodesk!! :))
So am I just supposed to “trust” Adobe that their backward compatibility is just going to work on a project from 6 years ago? Trust that all the plugins remain compatible? If they void my old jobs that are viable for revision my view of their product becomes much less “worth it”. It makes nuke even a switch option expensive as it is because if I cannot update jobs for clients off of my archives I better pay for one I can, not every job I do is brand new.
Totally agree. Has me worried about revisions, no matter how tiny, will be a pain. In one I did in CS6, a bunch of text animating in 3D space that synch and align with stuff that was rendered from 3ds Max. I originally tried opening it in 2017 and 2018, and the animations no longer align with the camera view so I had to use 2014 to do the small text update, which only took a couple minutes. So if I have to update that one again and can’t use older seats of AE, dozens of 3D text animations will have to be redone. We don’t want to eat that cost, but it really isn’t fair to charge the client for all of that extra time that was needed to change a couple words.
Not to mention random 3rd party plugins that are included with some older versions of AE. Or even some that we purchased and kept updated. If I did something with older Red Giant plugins years ago, sure I can open them in 2018 or 2019, but they open with newer versions of the plugins, which are not always a 1:1 conversion, Looks for example. I can’t install older versions of Looks in software that it wasn’t developed for and expect it to work.
Makes you feel nervous about the susbtance thing all over again.
Upgrading from CC2015 requires a Win10 upgrade from Win7. That’s a lot to ask!
Wow… I didn’t think about that… amazing…
Adumpbe…