Adobe Strikes Back

I got a call from a graphic designer friend this week who, for reasons that will become clear, wishes to remain anonymous. At my embarrassed friend’s request, I’ll refer to him as “Tasty Biscuit”.

Tasty Biscuit was working on a “blah-a-day” calendar project in Adobe InDesign. 365+ separate pages of layout, each page craftily tweaked for maximum visual impact. His copy of InDesign, however, was not exactly legal. He’d gotten it from a former employee who had gotten it from who knows where.

When Tasty Biscuit finally finished his weeks of work on the calendar, he shipped it off to the printer. Hours later, the printer called to tell him that his copy of InDesign refused to open the file. Since the file opened fine on his computer, he decided to try on another PC in the office, that had a different version of InDesign on it.

That machine wouldn’t open the file either. He compared the versions of the two pieces of software against each other and discovered, to his surprise, that the version he had been working in was a beta copy.

When he googled for the problem, he discovered a universe of people with the same problem.

As it turns out, Adobe is well aware that software from their beta programs regularly gets pirated and passed around. So, before they released InDesign 2.0, they made sure that the final version would not open files created in the betas. Official beta testers with files they needed access to could send them to Adobe for conversion. Everyone else was out of luck.

Imagine the terror of having put weeks of work into something, only to find out that you were going to have to recreate the whole thing from scratch, since your software was not properly licensed. Tasty Biscuit lucked out and was able to convert the file into PDF and convince the printer to print from that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he’ll be spending some time in the near future making sure that all of his software is legitimate.

I have mixed feelings about this sort of “copy protection”. On one hand, if more companies took approaches like this, it would probably encourage businesses to get compliant on their licenses very quickly. Not being able to exchange data with your clients and vendors is a pretty effective motivater. Adobe has used the user’s personal and professional network as a way to sell more software.

On the other hand, if you follow this approach to its logical conclusion, an application that thinks it has been pirated should just nuke your PC to punish you for your misbehavior.

It must be interesting to be the tech support guy at Adobe who fields the sobbing phone calls from designers with files that are essentially useless.

Posted by pmk at October 15, 2004 11:19 AM | TrackBack