An independent contractor using Adobe is still helping cement Adobe’s perception as a must-have for business. If you worked in that space at all, it was super common to have things like Illustrator or Photoshop specified in contracts for designers and print shops, and pretty much everyone needed Acrobat Pro for sone proprietary feature which didn’t exist in the alternatives.

Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.

Anybody remember the Business Software Alliance[0] from years ago threatening to audit your company for using unlicensed software? I cannot believe any business would be dumb enough to allow them on their premises to even conduct an audit. Anyone with two brain cells would just laugh in their face.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance

How exactly are you supposed to do that, when your license includes their right to audit your business? If you refuse them they're going to sue you, and they have far more money to spend on lawyers than your business.

You need to have proof that the software is being used. You also have to provide notice and cannot expect to just walk up and demand inspections. Also, this is a private company so they have no authority to do this.

The primary bit of evidence to the BSA was/is from disgruntled employees "ratting" on their employer. Is that sufficient evidence of a crime to justify a warrant for any TLA to do an investigation? If not, that's the only way you're looking at my computers.

Again, laughing in their face would be my response.

And yet it was only last week we started hearing of Oracle sending nastygrams to Java users:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/fortune_200_oracle_ja...

As covered here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40639943

So this is not just a thing of the past, sadly.

Were they not working for a company?

Many graphic artists operate as independent contractors/consultants.

Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly undervalued.

For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.

So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.

And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.

Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.

No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the independent artists that work without being attached to a firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type places in the graphics/marketing type of world is apparently a much more common thing than the readers of this forum are familiar.

Is this still the case with Creative Cloud? I'm surprised that that would be so expensive for people whose job it is to use it.