This is 100% intentional to drive users to subscriptions.
The computer fraud and abuse act could also be applied for criminal charges -- Adobe misused and misappropriated their access to customer data and systems. Arguing that it was a "mistake" and "we are sorry" does not correct the damage done. If Adobe makes such a fuss over protecting their IP, then they should not be surprised when their customers do so also. There is a potential for a class action here as well. And Adobe is very profitable -- some legal team representing this case, even if pro bono, will be/become quite rich.
Moreover, telling people that they should have X, and Y, and Z, to protect themselves from the mistakes of rogue actors/apps, is simply a displacement of responsibility tactic.
Just because something illegal/damaging was "done with a computer" does not mean it was "ok" and "an apology is enough" -- now pay us for our services you miserable worm/user!
Especially if a third party, not a party to the EULA, owned the photo. If, for example, a news photographer for a newspaper had a photo lost, and the photographer, but not the employer, had agreed to the EULA, the newspaper might sue.
This is an important point. If a third party who is not bound by the EULA suffers damages, they can sue for negligence. The EULA binds only those who have agreed to it.
[1] https://shawnetuma.com/cyber-law-resources/what-does-cfaa-me...
I support the principle that having permission to install updates should not grant carte blanche to have those updates do anything no matter how harmful, and indeed I would be in favour of much stronger regulation of technology in this area. However, I'm not sure how much that would help if there isn't some mechanism for regulators to assess statutory/punitive damages in some form. Even then, there's no way for a regulator to fairly allocate any financial compensation available to users who were, or claim to have been, affected. We're effectively trying to create a deterrent rather than trying to compensate for actual losses here, and with something like lost personal work, you can never make good the damage just with money anyway.
The same principle could maybe be applied here?
(Usual disclaimer I am not a lawyer etc)
In this case some sort of statutory deterrent would probably be a much more effective solution. I honestly doubt that regulation is a good solution here though - bugs like this are so severe from a PR perspective that there's already a huge incentive to avoid them.
(This reminds me of that time that Steam on Linux ate every last user file on the system whole. https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671)
Microsoft paid "low six figures" for Bliss (the Windows XP desktop background) but only $300 ($45 to the photographer) for Autumn (a different desktop background)[1].
If you get physically injured and you successfully sue how do they determine the damages to award you? There isn't a dollar amount for physical pain. They can't test an alternate future where you aren't injured and see how much money you make. They just make up estimates. It would be the same here; they would estimate the monetary and emotional damage of losing the pictures.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2017/12/23/microsoft-xp-bliss-photog-p...
That has never stopped those other knights of IP theft, the RIAA and MPAA
The analogous organisations don't tend to try that kind of stunt here in the UK. Unless the copyright infringement is criminal, in a civil action our legal system currently only provides for actual damages to be awarded, and it's usual for the winning party to be awarded their legal fees at the loser's expense.
So unless there are some kind of statutory/punitive damages available for each lost photo in a case like this, it doesn't seem to be a comparable situation.
And honestly, it's good this way. If you want to secure your photos, make backups yourself or sign a contract with some company that will guarantee something. But once they are liable and can be sued, the service will be astronomically expensive.
Moreover, the the click accept "contract" is not license for extortion -- does not make extortion legal. A mere contract does not make arson legal, even if accidental; does not make man-slaughter legal, etc.
The computer fraud and abuse act applies, regardless of contract. Adobe accessed user computers/hosts in a way inconstant with user defined permissions, usage policies, etc. I have a usage policy that you "signed" or did the equivalent of "clicked through": if you (Adobe) elect to install your automatic app update on my host hardware, you certify that you will not delete any data files stored on that hardware. Just because Adobe did not bother to read the language of my hardware usage policies, which has language that it "supersedes all other agreements between the hardware host owner and the app installer, does not mean that they/Adobe are "immune" and can simply ignore their liability for IP destroyed.
There has to be a way to get these $#%@#% -- enough is enough.
If the cost for breakage is too high they just won't make any changes unless absolutely necessary. But the market has spoken and people prefer flashy new features and updates instead of boring railroad control-like software that is works the same way for decades.
You can't have it both ways. If your data is important don't just store it on a single device. These photos were just stored on a single device that could break for any reason any day anyway.
Unless Adobe can be shown to have been criminally negligent or intentionally malicious I don't think there's a case here but ianal.
Also agree with your point about making backups if anything is significantly important, though I've also found a lot of products in recent times are deliberately making it harder to create backups (Slack comes to mind here)
If users could actually evaluate the guarantees and have reasonable assurance that they would be upheld, I suspect this is exactly the direction the industry would take.
However, because it's unreasonably expensive to verify that those guarantees hold (relative to the value the software offers), end-users have no reason to prefer products that offer them to products which merely claim to be secure.
Turning a process/culture that works 99% of the time into 99.99% is often surprisingly expensive. For example currently as a company you may have some slightly less attentive engineers or less strict code review process for convenience and speed, or you may pursue lots of projects with tight deadlines etc. which can lead to a situation like this with non negligible chance, but usually won't. Most of the software you use doesn't routinely delete user data, it's an accident. To avoid it you need to hire higher quality engineers or more of them to give them breathing room and less workload, and have to give up on some new features and innovation, which is really not so easy in a competitive market.
It has? When was the market given a choice?
I, for one, would be absolutely fine with having fewer shiny new features but also not having software I rely on break all the time. The current culture of just shoving everything out, whatever condition it's in and regardless of the consequences of any potential failure, and saying you'll patch any problems later is toxic and quietly causing enormous damage to our society.
The culture of saying you can sell some hardware product with embedded software, or some software product that is hosted online or based on a subscription model, and then effectively force users who have already committed to that product to accept arbitrary changes whether they want them or not, is also toxic.
We don't know how to reliably write 100% bug-free software, but we do know how to write better software than much of what is produced today. Getting a significant increase in quality isn't even that expensive, since the long-term savings from reduced maintenance and increased productivity help to offset or even outweigh any additional costs during initial development. However, it does require hiring people with actual skill and knowledge to write the software instead of just assembling a cheap team of code monkeys. It also requires your leadership team to actually care about quality and plan to achieve it and provide resources accordingly.
IMNSHO, our industry would benefit from having more developers and leaders with these skills and mindsets, but until there is some form of pressure (and again, I couldn't disagree more that the status quo is a result of genuine customer preference) the economic drivers aren't pushing towards training up new software developers to be better and having leaders plan for good quality products in many cases. After all, why waste time and money doing something right if you can do it wrong but cheaper and still charge almost the same for it anyway? I think we're well overdue for genuine competition in the market and/or regulatory intervention to drive standards up.
And again for an Adobe creative product all this is still fine. Not losing your data is a solved problem and it's called a backup.
I very very much doubt that a person who doesn't bother to back up their professional data (keeps it all on a single device that may break any day) will have the brains and mental models to understand an argument involving software quality and that they should pay premium for something so intangible and abstract as opposed to visible things like features and a modern look and feel/polish.
In some analogous cases with ignorant customers the state steps in and creates consumer protection regulation, but its usually only for really dangerous stuff that can kill you or make you sick, like food safety, not just delete your wedding pics.
On this point, I just can't agree. Regardless of whether or not users have effective back-ups -- and we all know that for various reasons, sometimes they don't, even if they believed they did -- it simply isn't acceptable for someone to push out a software patch that destroys data incorrectly.
I don't think it's a trivial thing if someone loses data of great personal value, whether it's wedding photos, or a video of your child's first play at school, or precious footage of a friend or relative who is no longer with you, or just a personal project you've put a lot of work into. These things matter to people, and even if they didn't arrange for effective back-ups, it's not their fault that the data was destroyed in this case, it's 100% on Adobe for screwing up.
In some analogous cases with ignorant customers the state steps in and creates consumer protection regulation, but its usually only for really dangerous stuff that can kill you or make you sick, like food safety, not just delete your wedding pics.
I don't know where in the world you are, so maybe that is the case for you. At least here in the UK, and in Europe more widely, consumer protection laws tend to be quite strong and quite well regarded by the public, and they certainly aren't limited to life-or-death kinds of issues (though of course we have specialised safety regulations in those kinds of areas too).
Not having multiple site backups isn't criminally negligent when running a paid cloud service?
Those disclaimers often have far less legal effect than the text would suggest, because jurisdictions often limit the effect of warranty disclaimers by sellers, and also because of product liability laws which are distinct from warranty protection (though similar to the lay understanding of warranty protection.)
In practice it’s fine, IF, files in the users’ hands is the master, cloud is a copy and format used is some sort of open standards.
Lets say I sent a mail, attachment got lost, but it’s a copy, besides it’s just a jpg, so send it again. Okay.
These cloud SaaS offerings are different: they tries to make the cloud as master, in proprietary format.
So local side is the xerox copy, and you have to go through complimentary conversion service to export the original if you sir insist, and they may cease access to the files on the cloud and copies on your computer but it’s somehow “your fault“ when they do that.
That doesn’t work! Either they assume full responsibility for content they hold, or we hold every rights, as we did, as we should.
I have multiple occasion where OneDrive thought it needs to steal my files from home directories, then change mind and don’t upload, but decides to reflect the reality that it’s not on the cloud. “Where are my files?” my ass you wiped another Desktop folder!
Moreover, the the click accept "contract" is not license for extortion -- does not make extortion legal. A mere contract does not make arson legal, even if accidental; does not make man-slaughter legal, etc.
The computer fraud and abuse act applies, regardless of contract. Adobe accessed user computers/hosts in a way inconstant with user defined permissions, usage policies, etc. I have a usage policy that you "signed" or did the equivalent of "clicked through": if you (Adobe) elect to install your automatic app update on my host hardware, you certify that you will not delete any data files stored on that hardware. Just because Adobe did not bother to read the language of my hardware usage policies, which has language that it "superceedes all other agreements between the hardware host owner and the app installer, does not mean that they/Adobe are "immune" and can simply ignore their liability for IP destroyed.
There has to be a way to get these $#%@#% -- enough is enough.
"Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned."
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-...
What happened is that Adobe pirated someone else's software - specifically, Dolby's. They slathered surround-sound support into all their apps, but used very questionable accounting methods to avoid paying for all that licensing. For example, if they added 5.1 support to Premiere, they'd only count it as a "sale" if you actually opened Premiere and used that particular feature. This is a blatant license violation.
Creative Cloud used to have a feature where you could install old versions of their software, all the way back to CS6. Of course, if Dolby's lawsuit worked out, each version you installed could count as a separate license violation. Hence, they took away that very generous old version support and said you only get the latest version and last year's version.
As one of the developers for Ruffle, this absolutely sucks, because there is no Adobe-sanctioned way to generate test Flash movies with ActionScript 2 code anymore. That support was removed when they released the first Creative Cloud version of Flash, which is already many years old and also not provided by Adobe anymore.
I wouldn't say 'blatant'. That seems like a reasonable tactic in a vacuum.
I guess they could have made it a separate download and install when you click that menu option, but the end result would be the same.
But if you look at what actually happens to the IP, there's a good argument that dolby has no right to any payment from a user that never touches their IP.
There are some tech companies I don't have a particularly positive view of and try to avoid, such as Facebook. Only Adobe, however, do I consider such an execrable blight on the industry that I have a firm, no-exceptions, "never again" policy.
Most of the time, piracy is used because it's just more convenient then properly paying [0]. Those who still pirate, despite there existing a more convenient option to pay usually can't afford it, and will pay when they can.
In the meantime, the name of your program becomes a verb and an industry standard, and everyone has to deal with it.
[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/11/25/gabe-says-piracy-isn...
Not for Joe McConsumer, at least from a usability/convenience perspective.
As an example, Big Sur will drop support for Mac Minis from before the Haswell 2014 models.
If Apple don't care about customers with purchases that are more than 6 years old, is it fair to expect Adobe to?
(That's ignoring Catalina's estimated support date likely to be 2022, as that's presumably not the sort of macOS update to which you refer.)
I split up my catalogs aggressively, so I don’t really know how many images I have saved. But it’s in the hundreds of thousands.
New Lightroom might be OK for the casual photographer. But for the pro or even advanced amateur, the new Lightroom is completely useless.
His reasoning, when I asked about "NAS" or so, was: it's cheap, it lasts, and it is cold storage. Paying for storage of that amount that is fire-, flood and software-error-proof is so much more expensive that it really was no choice. -his words-.
Flash storage degrades, and is only expected to last about 10 years or so.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/Solid...
I know someone who had their files vanish off a thumbdrive in the space of a few months of storage.
I’m pretty bad at storage discipline. And I admit that most of what I store is generally useless. But there’s diminishing returns on deciding what to store, vs. storing everything.
I have a little hard drive toaster that I keep a revolving 5tb spinning disc drive in. It’s my “storage” drive, and once it fills up I replace it with new ones. I don’t shoot “professionally” as in for clients, but I shoot some fairly large scale images, that result in lots and lots of data. And my working files can get up to 10gb in size. So I vigorously backup my working files, and I’m only halfassedly storing all the captures in case I need to go back and review, or dig up BTS. Lastly I have a pretty cheap and crappy SSD that I use as a sort of scratch disc. If I shoot teatherd, I’ll capture to it, or if I’m working on an image I’ll work off the SSD until the image is complete, and then move it to me of the spinning disc drives.
I currently have 3 filled 5tb drives with captures, and a drobo that I keep my working files on (tiffs, psd’s, psb’s).
If none of what I’m saying adds up, take a look at my images, and hopefully it will make it slightly more clear: http://agroism.com
Moving to Capture One or something else seems worthwhile. Tried Darktable but wasn’t a big fan.
So, you can open it in a SQLite GUI (eg sqlitebrowser.org, which I'm a dev member of) to see and/or screw with stuff?
The downside of the SQLite dB is no network editing. I’d love to be able to edit from multiple machines without a cloud subscription or super slow NFS.
You don’t need to have your photos inside the catalog either, they can be referenced externally.
If you like to maintain your own structure, you might like the Sessions feature. It’s an folder-based alternative to the monolithic catalog.
I also like the EIP package format. You can package an image into a zip of the original image and all Capture One data. Then it’s just one file for your archives but everything you need is there for the future. Even if you can’t open the Capture One bits at some point, the original is still in there.
How long have you been working with Affinity? It's not Adobe's software and it's not trying to be, so there is always going to be some period of adjustment while you get used to a new way of doing things. IME, that passed very quickly, and within a few hours I was doing most basic tasks as readily in Affinity products as I would have done in CS/CC ones, but my work is usually more in Designer than Photo.
There is still quite a bit of useful functionality present in CC but missing in Affinity, which is a more serious problem for power users who have workflows and presets and plug-ins and so on set up with the Adobe products. But the Affinity suite seems to be developing rapidly, so perhaps in time this gap will close too.
Lightroom -> Capture One was an upgrade. Even when the learning curve is taken into account, I found C1 to be superior piece of software. It's faster, its color editing is better, and the default look it gives me was just better, at least for my camera.
Photoshop -> Affinity Photo was painful. I'd estimate the pain to be "moderate". It misses some features I want (color calibration targets support, some layer blending modes) and some others are not as great (no smart sharpening). Affinity UX of working with layers is surprisingly painful and the attention to detail in the UI is poor. But since 90% of my time is spent in C1 anyway, I found it tolerable.
It also has 'sessions' which are aimed at individual shoots or projects. I suspect most pros use them instead of catalogues. It's essentially a self-contained directory structure that C1 understands,
For example, Lightroom does not allow custom colour spaces for the output, they're restricted to a fixed list of baked-in ICC profiles. The only option is to export in the large ProPhoto space and then externally convert to the target space as a second step.
Lightroom has no support for true HDR, the type that requires HDR10 or Dolby Vision displays. If you want to edit a 14-bit RAW photo for, say, the background image in a HDR computer game or a YouTube video, Lightroom can't help you.
Even in SDR mode, the colour grading in Lightroom is much more primitive than Resolve. There's no vector scope, for example, something that would be trivial to implement for them.
Adobe talks a lot about their "AI" features, but they're very basic. They've left a lot of low hanging fruit on the tree. For example, it would be great feature that when flicking through a bunch of shots of a face while zoomed in, the eyes should be automatically aligned between each shot to make it easy to compare shots. Similarly, they could train an AI to recognise in-focus and out-of-focus faces, and automatically "score" a shot based on things like: "Are both eyes in focus, or just one?"
These days, this stuff is trivial to implement in software, yet Adobe is still firmly rooted in the 1900s era of "It's just like your darkroom! All the terminology of the black and white film era is unchanged! You can dodge! You can burn! Just... with a computer!"
Reminds me of AutoCAD 20+ years ago: it was a digital blueprint software. More computer-native CAD with proper 3D modelling capabilities such as SolidWorks ate their lunch...
Perpetual licensing means that software vendors are essentially competing with the previous versions of their own products and have to provide compelling improvements to their customers for them to upgrade. Ongoing revenue, and with it, vendor survival, depends on continual improvements.
In contrast, subscription models combined with cloud-based vendor lock-in allow software vendors to extract economic rents from their victims indefinitely. There are no previous versions to compete against and victims must pay in perpetuity to access their own data. Vendors get paid without needing to do work, so they do no work, make no improvements, and reap disproportionate profits.
Software subscriptions are a perfect example of rent seeking, with all that implies about the relationship between vendor and victim and the prospects for ongoing product improvements.
That's really the motive for a lot of things going cloud.