Hi, your blog post was brought to my attention. After reading this post, I want to apologize for the way that your issue was handled. Our tech support agent provided you incorrect information as far “that its OK to download pirated software”. This is not a company policy suggestion and should not of been suggested. We prefer to provide you a link to download the Adobe software from an Adobe server. Downloading pirated content can contain viruses and cause security issues. I can help you with downloading the software from the Adobe’s server. I have sent you my email via a private message on your contact page. Please contact me at your earliest convenience
Thank you
Scott V
Adobe Customer Care
Follow us on @AdobeCare
twitch
I was hoping for a successful resolution to the story at that point, given he was apparently meeting the sales guy at his palatial home.
"Image in your bank treated you this way..."
twitches again
Are you having difficulty understanding Scott's message or intent?
twitch attack
It runs at complete odds with the claim, and also what is clearly the expectation of the OP.
I think we, as humans, have issues with buying 'permission' to use a good, even a digital good; what we want is to -buy- the good. Not license it. And since when we 'buy' it, it's now ours, it's free for us to share (or so the logic goes).
It also seems rather amazing that Adobe's fix would be to tell you to download the software from an illegitimate source, given that the frequent anti-piracy scare tactics are that such downloads are ripe with malware, and will steal your serial, your bank account passwords, your soul, your little dog too, etc etc.
It is time for terracotta, porcelain or some other ceramic to start pushing their media wielding wares.
> Support: Yes Sir, that will work.
Seems to me if they tell you you can do something with their product, you aren't pirating. You're following their instructions, though I'm no lawyer.
Thus, downloading software should never be an offence.
He paid for the serial, not the software..
But to the point of your comment I would be wary of just considering it downloading. If, again using the bittorrent file transfer idea, you download a copy you could very well be considered to be making available the intellectual property for illegal obtainment. I personally wouldn't want to be stating "support said it was OK" if my ISP or an IP protection firm's lawyers take action. Since Adobe has worked with ISPs to monitor and issue complaints I wouldn't put this out of the realm of possibility.
It works for Windows as well. It is perfectly legal to use an "illegal" DVD to install the OS, given you have an appropriate license.
In the US, courts have gone both ways.
I paid for CS4, infrequent user, after a couple of hardware changes (SSDs etc) it wouldn't install anymore. Long Skype call to US (over an hour), treated like criminal.
Forget it, I'm your customer taking the burden of your business problems. Happy Acorn user now.
So many dollars over the years on PS/Macromedia/etc, never again.
So tired of companies treating honest customers like criminals.
Edit: how many times have I bought a movie on iTunes to show my kids how to do it right, and then torrented it as I couldn't wait for the download, too slow.
Strange, I find iTunes the fastest way to download media + you can watch while downloading. For me that usually means spend 30-60 seconds downloading and then start watching and the download keeps up.
Torrents are normally half an hour from start to finish.
Hey, at least you have the option of getting it on iTunes. Where I am, neither iTunes, Amazon Instant Video or any other online service is willing to even sell me the content I want.
Slightly in Adobe's defense, a subscription model would avoid this particular issue, where the customer needed support for a 4 year old version. Subscriptions just get everyone on a recent version always. The problem of course is that the subscription price is so much more expensive for casual/budget users. Casual users used to skip upgrades because they don't need all the latest features (some would say bloatware). Now they have to pay a minimum of $240/yr (1 app) and as much as $600/yr.
Adobe has essentially screwed these less profitable but very loyal and evangelistic customers in favor of extracting more revenue out of those that depend on Creative Suite. Wall St. responded favorably to this revenue pop but I fear this has (further) damaged Adobe's brand in the long term.
Interesting fact: the folks responsible for the Flash Platform fiasco were rewarded by being put in charge of Creative Suite. It's like the CEO said, sure, Flash worked out great, why not hand them the crown jewels and a shotgun?
BTW I 100% agree with the Sketch recommendation. It's much better than Fireworks or Photoshop for UI-related design.
(The supplementary keys are required to activate/validate a couple of included installers for older versions of a couple of products that are compatible with 32-bit Win XP whereas the 5.5 versions are not.)
If this hadn't been for a close family member, I would have given up.
Adobe will NEVER get another penny out of me -- nor them, for that matter.
---------
By the way, when it came down to it, all it took was for a "supervisor" -- to whom the support associates kept going while they put me on hold -- to understand, acknowledge, and attempt to use a system already available to them at their desk to look up the specific scenario and product package and have that system generate a key.
I ended up repeatedly explaining this to various support associates. Finally, one with a bit more gumption actually went back to their supervisor and prodded them to have a second look. 10 minutes later (while I sat again on hold), I finally had the license key or keys (I forget; 2 products were involved in the 32-bit older-version downgrade, IIRC).
THE ENTIRE 7.5 hour struggle was to learn for myself what their validation system was like and to repeatedly call and prod and follow through on ineffective suggestions in order to appease them, until finally a rep pushed back against their supervisor and that supervisor deigned to get off their duff and actually look in their system.
I tend to try to restrain my vitriol and particularly public expression of same, but in this case I will say: Die, Adobe, die!
P.S. Also, the support reps would promise to call back and check on the result of procedures they would insist I first try. I think once, one actually called me back. All the other call-back promises: Nothing.
Pixelmator and Acorn for Mac are not perfect replacements but after awhile you figure out what they do well and you start to not miss Adobe products.
also iDraw... all of them together are trivial in cost compared to anything Adobe.
There are no alternatives that have even half-way decent PSD support (through no fault of their own, of course).
Here's how you can afford it: avoid eating 5 sandwiches in a posh bar per month, and cook sometimes by yourself.
Not sure if this strategy is starting to take a back seat with their new subscription offerings. Seems like they might be trying to bring the pirates into the fold. Time will tell.
Another example: games.
A AAA game costs 60$ on Steam a price 90% of the people online in South America can't afford. So what happened recently? A lot of latinamerican online stores sell Steam games for a much more realistic price. For example, a AAA game costs $30-$40 on sites like Nuuvem.
At least with formats like DOC, there are free reader apps available and free converters, because the format has public specifications and is used for interchange. In comparison, working with artists and designers is just plain expensive, because they all use Photoshop and the only way to consume their work is to buy Photoshop.
You can call the OP names if you want, but I think the larger evil here is what Adobe's done.
"B.. b.. but", you might say, "you can't just force Adobe to write a free converter!"
Well, you can't force me to pay for their paid software. And I'm someone who has spent thousands of dollars on graphics software of various kinds over the years.
No dice. It was not supported any more; I even had the license, but the company's activation servers no longer worked. I could pay $400 or so to buy a new version or do without.
I did without. I refuse to buy that company's products.
Let's see . . . oh yeah, Omnipage.
The activation was painful, too, involving a key server and a few cut-and-paste operations that were easy to get wrong.
I haven't needed to do any OCR in the last couple of years, but I'm sure I'll investigate other options than Omnipage before I'll use their products again.
I'm happy to buy software. But I have to be able to use it indefinitely, without activations (which depend on companies still being around) or time-limited licenses that are just designed to fuel an upgrade pump. I don't insist on source code or freedom, just quality. I'm not on a holy mission, I just won't buy software on bad terms.
All you need to do after that is insert your Student and Teacher serial number.
I made a little video[1] explaining how to install MS Office Mac 2011 onto a MacBook Air -- for my own use, in case I ever needed to do it again -- and it's received over 36,000 views.
LOTS of people have trouble with this. The Microsofts and Adobes in the industry don't appear to realize the difficulty their customers face.
I don't understand the distaste people have regarding wired networking. In my office, I have several people who complain about the wifi having congestion. In the heart of the CBD, with tons of other networks visible. "That network cable on your desk, which I put there for you to use, plug it in and this problem goes away". They plug it in, comment on how quick and clean their network is now... then complain the next day about wifi congestion.
They make some awesome hardware, but their attempts at DRM made me never want to risk my hard earned cash on them again.
[0] back then… ha ha… 3 years ago.
There's also the issue of Student/Teacher edition means you can't use it except for educational purposes, and it seems like the author was going to use them for professional work, which means he needs a different license, legally speaking.
Finally, it's not up to Adobe to provide you with installers just because you can't be bothered to go get a disk drive. They're not that expensive. The problem exists solely on the author's side, not Adobe's.
Absolute bullshit. When you're paying HUNDREDS of dollars for software, damn right I expect better support 4 years down the track. Hell, it's barely even support. Let me download it, like you used to only two years back. Are you kidding me?
You didn't pay for any sort of extended warranty. Legally the only warranty required is that at time of purchase it work as advertised. It did, and while Adobe has an additional warranty they've added, it doesn't say you get everything you wish for just because you want it.
Even saying you purchased the full creative suite at $2600, that's $650/year, $54.17/month. You didn't pay all that much for it, slightly less than $2 a day. Even assuming you purchased it near the end of it's life, that's 3 years, making it $72.23/month, which is only $2.37/day. That's less than the price of a meal.
Additionally, they have no responsibility to provide you with an installer. You got your installer, based on the post the author still had the installer, but happened to purchase a computer without a disk drive, which is essentially purchasing a computer without the minimum system requirements of the installer. The author could purchase a disk drive, or borrow a disk drive, or use his old computer's disk drive across the network (something OS X has the capability to do built in).
Adobe also never had to provide downloads of those installers in the first place. Just because they previously had them available to download doesn't mean they have a responsibility to continue keeping them available for download. Your losing your disks is your fault, not Adobe's.
So, bullshit yourself.
I used quark for years back in the day and when InDesign CS1 came out it seemed like the industry switched overnight. Until then even though both Quarks 4 and 5 had been released no one I knew, including printers, had gone further than Quark 3.1.
The entire creative suite cost less than Quark and Photoshop was essential anyway. No contest. Plus it had support for OS X, could do transparency (no more creating drop shadows in Photoshop and importing them as a flat TIFF, the joy!), had really good typography support (no more creating a separate text box for bullets and manually aligning them), and getting a press-ready PDF out of it wasn't some sort of voodoo.
The difference 10 years makes. Now Adobe software is slow, bloated and buggy with only minor reasons to upgrade version to version. It seems like the fit and finish is worse on each release and watching photoshop or illustrator creak into life, even on my SSD macbook, is a painful experience.
I think the only reason I've upgraded recently is due to their policy of making newer version file formats incompatible with the older version, so I've had to if I want to open files from colleagues. Creative Cloud is a blatant attempt to extract as much rent as they can before the gig is up, not as a way to provide a useful service. For that reason I won't be upgrading from CS6, even though as a designer it's the software I use most.
We need an Adobe competitor who'll either remind them they can write good software when they have to or consign them to irrelevance.
Also, we're talking about an academic version of the software, which retails for about $200, not the full $799 for one App, or $2200+ for the full suite. They sell it to students so some day they'll buy the real thing when they do commercial work, which the academic license doesn't allow.
Then you start seeing job postings looking for "GIMP experience required."
Yes, Adobe has a ridiculous pricing policy, especially if you live outside the US (yeah, translating from English to English is expansive, UK version, AUS version, I get that </irony>). But that is a different point, I think.
also, hilarious that in my chrome, the obnoxiously massive adobe flash banner on your blog is crashing: http://snag.gy/FEVCV.jpg
Also, the "time [OP has] spent thinking about this, writing about it, on the phone, and now responding to people about it" is certainly worth more than $30 since it represents an issue that many people (including myself) have encountered, and I'm glad someone took the time to publicly document their frustration on behalf of the rest of us sharing that frustration.
At first the reason was that it was a resource hog diminishing battery life and destroying silence while being a security issue, but adobe dropped support anyways.
The question is, "Am I breaking copyright law by downloading this software?"
Here's a flow chart so you can check for yourself:
Did you purchase said software?
a) Yes
-> Then you are not breaking copyright law.
b) No
-> Then you are breaking copyright law.
Many people have these stories. How you got screwed over by some proprietary company in some way. The only solution is for the company to guarantee their trustworthiness by respecting software freedom i.e. being FLOSS.
You can download Adobe CS2 for free.
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?pid=4485...
If you have your legal serial number for the software...it isn't pirating.
There is a hack you can run to trick the installer into thinking the drive is case-insensitive and after that everything works without any problems. No further hacks or workarounds needed until you have to install again on a clean machine.
I know it is not their most common use case but it can't be that hard!
I was amazed they didn't have a real procedure for it, but that's how a real support team handles the issue.
My friends on tpb had it.
Never mind that employers probably won't have them installed, and probably won't allow them to be used in house, they won't care if Gimp and Inkscape are on your resume if they're looking specifically to hire for photoshop/illustrator experience, and these alternatives would also have to deal with proprietary image formats, which might make the end result unacceptable to free software purists.
I suspect the projects are just short on developer effort, and that no-one decided it was "good enough" to not need improvement. If you are submitting patches that are being denied by the project maintainers, you are welcome to fork the project. That is the "open source community".
Seems like your overlords got the memo. ;-)
I stopped reading after this.
- SVG files from vector layers. - PNG files form rastered layers.
I'm back to pirating.
Or maybe connecting an external DVD drive/using Apple Software to connect to some DVD drive over network.
Instead this guy wastes his time calling hotlines and writing a pointless blog post - I guess that's what it means to be more productive on a Mac. (Of course, there are people that don't know how to solve such an issue, but this person is probably not one of them)
Obtaining the software from other sources is obviously an option, but not one that should be required, especially for someone trying to "play by the rules."
EDIT: While I agree that digital-only distribution carries inherent risks to the buyer (and the buyer should normally maintain thier own backup of installation files), I think most people consider that risk to be associated with things like the publisher going out of business or some other major calamity. In this case, it sounds like Adobe is willfully removing these download options (I'm sure the file didn't disappear from Adobe's servers without someone in management deliberately making a decision to remove it) with the intent to encourage people to upgrade.
In this case "pirating" was a viable solution but the quest for a binary changed into one about "rightfulness". Reality check: "what are you trying to achieve?".
What is annoying to me is that this is so obvious and trivial to everybody here on HN, yet this developer feels it is important to declare to the world that he is going to pirate Adobe software from now on because of his "shocking" experience with Adobes customer support.
In the end it might even be that the software was always available on Adobes website, but some frontend developer made a mistake, or that the support guy didn't know better and gave him bad advise.
And then there's this line:
> I was greeted by Adobe’s “International” support team, based out of India where they can pay pennies on the dollar for you to get support in broken english. It’s almost as good as real english… almost.
My blood starts to boil when I read something like that, even though I agree that it can be hard to communicate with someone that doesn't speak your language well.
From where? Torrents? And risk malware and viruses?
And if it's precracked/modded/etc. then it's definitely not the original, but those who are downloading those would consider the modifications to be value-added.
I have yet to encounter a hard to detect and remove virus coming from a downloaded software from "somewhere else", I'd rather install software coming from the scene than a download portal such as softonic.