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."