Users of older versions of Adobe Creative Cloud apps including Photoshop have been told to stop using them or face potential "infringement claims" from third-party companies who are unnamed but suspected to be Dolby. Adobe cites only "ongoing litigation" as the reason for the abrupt announcement. //

While Adobe has not said who the dispute is with, the company is presently being sued by Dolby. Through a legal complaint filed in March 2019 with the US District Court and the Northern District of California, Dolby is seeking a jury trial over issues of "copyright infringement and breach of contract" against Adobe.

Prior to the creation of the Creative Cloud subscription service, Adobe licensed certain technologies from Dolby with an agreement based on how many discs of certain apps were sold. Now that the software is distributed online, the companies reportedly renegotiated their agreement to be based on how many users are actually running the software.

According to Dolby's legal filing, this agreement was subject to the figures Adobe reported being examined by a third-party audit. "When Dolby sought to exercise its right to audit Adobe's books and records to ensure proper reporting and payment, Adobe refused to engage in even basic auditing and information sharing practices; practices that Adobe itself had demanded of its own licensees," says the filing."Adobe apparently determined that it was better to spend years withholding this information from Dolby than to allow Dolby to understand the full scope of Adobe's contractual breaches," it continues. "Yet the limited information that Dolby has reviewed to-date demonstrates that Adobe included Dolby technologies in numerous Adobe software products and collections of products, but refused to report each sale or pay the agreed-upon royalties owed to Dolby."

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.

“We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”

Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions. //

...consumers now live in a world in which consumers almost never actually own anything that contains software. In this new reality, end users are forced to agree to “take it or leave it” end user license agreements (EULAs), in which the licensor can change its terms of service without notice.

“Even if Adobe is fully in the right here with regard to the Dolby dispute, it has the power to force its customers to upgrade to newer more expensive versions at its whim, which illustrates the undue power and influence of EULAs over the lives of consumers,” Gilbert said. “We should be able to own the things we buy.”Activist, author, and copyright expert Cory Doctorow agreed, telling Motherboard in an email that this kind of thinking has increasingly permeated countless sectors, including DRM-based media, software as a service, and even client-server games.

Both Doctorow and Gilbert noted that this kind of shifting landscape can often be particularly problematic for artists and creators, who often don’t want to risk ongoing projects by suddenly jumping to new versions of software that may contain unforeseen bugs. “When your tools are designed to treat you as a mere tenant, rather than an owner, you're subject to the whims, machinations, and unforeseeable risks of the landlord from whom you rent,” Doctorow noted. “And your legal rights are likely defined by a ‘contract’ that you clicked through a million years ago, which says that you agree that you don't have any legal rights.”

It’s a comical, lopsided arrangement that copyright experts say isn’t changing anytime soon, leaving consumers with only one real option: when possible, don’t buy products from companies with a history of pulling the carpet out from beneath your feet.

A U.S. court has recently (Jan 19th, 2006) ruled that caching does not constitute a copyright violation, because of fair use and an implied license (Field vs Google, US District Court, District of Nevada, CV-S-04-0413-RCJ-LRL, see also news article on Government Technology). Implied license refers to the industry standards mentioned above: If the copyright holder does not use any no-archive tags and robot exclusion standards to prevent caching, WebCite® can (as Google does) assume that a license to archive has been granted. Fair use is even more obvious in the case of WebCite® than for Google, as Google uses a “shotgun” approach, whereas WebCite® archives selectively only material that is relevant for scholarly work. Fair use is therefore justifiable based on the fair-use principles of purpose (caching constitutes transformative and socially valuable use for the purposes of archiving, in the case of WebCite® also specifically for academic research), the nature of the cached material (previously made available for free on the Internet, in the case of WebCite® also mainly scholarly material), amount and substantiality (in the case of WebCite® only cited webpages, rarely entire websites), and effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (in the case of Google it was ruled that there is no economic effect, the same is true for WebCite®).

I am a huge fan of informed debate.  I have on more than a few occasions been a part of of official, organized panel discussions with representatives of both sides of this issue or that. But I have found two-sided panels to be an endangered species in Washington, D.C.  //

The author finds it offensive that IP creators…want to protect their IP when their employees leave their employ. Just as a tractor manufacturer doesn’t want an outgoing employee driving off the lot with an armada of unpaid-for threshers.

If people are stealing IP – people aren’t paying for IP. Which means rather rapidly – no one will have other jobs to which to go. Because when no one is paid for IP – no one can hire for IP. Rendering “employment mobility” – ancient history. //

“How fundamental are intellectual property rights, i.e. the rights accruing to an inventor or author or company of exclusive ownership of their own work or invention as enshrined in patent and copyright laws?…

“Strong IPR protections, for example, not only incentivize inventors and IP stakeholders,…(t)hose protections…generate a revenue stream of royalties through which companies can fund the next generation of innovation.”

IMSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project and started on February 16, 2006. It is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores based on the wiki principle; it is also more than that. Users can exchange musical ideas through the site, submit their own compositions, or listen to other people's composition; this makes IMSLP an ever-growing musical community of music lovers for music lovers.

Is IMSLP legal?

As the IMSLP servers are physically hosted in Canada, IMSLP has to follow Canadian copyright law. There is also a legally unaffiliated US-located server that can only be contributed to by admins and offers out-of-copyright files in the US only. All scores submitted to IMSLP either belong to the public domain, or permission has been granted by the copyright holder to host them here. The copyright status of every file is marked, and it is clearly indicated if it is not legal to download a file in the EU.

What is the "Public Domain"?

Basically, it means that every score that was published more than 50 years ago is no longer under copyright in Canada, as long as the last author of the publication also died more than 50 years ago.