Adobe goes ballistic over a tweet linking to a 27-year-old version of Acrobat Reader

I like Foxit PDF reader; been using it for ages.

They should have required them to be signed by an attorney, or under penalty of perjury. The harm to someone who knowingly signed this absolute piece of shit should be greater than the harm suffered from the people who have had non-incriminating shit removed.

I know, I’m coming from an assumption where the Legislature works for the People, not the Mouse.

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Mildly surprised to learn that people still use Acrobat Reader on purpose.

This is the 21st century; what OS can’t handle PDF files natively?

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Ugg. There are “features” that require the official reader. One recent example was some insurance paperwork. I have 5 claims. It’s the same form except the date of service is different. Because of poor UX, when I “signed” the form it locked it. No changes could be made, I can’t undo, and I’d need to download a new form and start over. Why are we recreating the most miserable parts of working with pen and paper?

I’ve also had other quirky PDFs that require the official reader.

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It absolutely does matter when they use the takedown process defined by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Twitter explanation said it Adobe filed a compliant DMCA notice. Those notices are filed under penalty of perjury. If Twitter had simply said it was a terms of service violation, then I’d agree with you.

That’s simply not true. Issues of knowingly and accidentally false claims can be sued for damages damages to both the party falsely accused and to the service provider that hosted the content (plus everyones’ attorneys’ fees).

DMCA takedown notices are filed under penalty of perjury. And the copyright holder is also responsible for damages and attorneys’ fees if they inadvertently file an incorrect one.

That sounds good in theory, but how often has some company or industry association had to pay out on that? Watching Scientology make many bogus DMCA claims over the years, I’ve read a few legal explanations of why it’s not as easy to sue someone for making false claims as it first seems after a quick read of the DMCA.

I don’t have any of those explanations handy at the moment, sorry.

I’m not sure how often it’s just because PDF is a pretty big standard once you wander outside some of the core features, and there are simply good-faith wrinkles in interoperability; and how much that’s the result of the more or less direct conflict posed by the fact that PDF is both supposed to be a oh-so-neutral-and-documented-suitable-for-archival-purposes ISO standard and the output format of a couple of product lines that Adobe makes the actual money from (Acrobat, plus ‘Livecycle’ and ‘Document Cloud for Business’ and possibly a few other PDFs-will-be-both-the-paperless-office-and-a-revolution-in-digital-marketing things); so Adobe has both the capability and the incentive to see to it that a lot of ‘PDF’ is simply “what happens when you tell Acrobat to save” and everyone else is forced to try to catch up.

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If you think the DMCA is being used for anything other than an excuse for corporations to force platforms to do their will, you aren’t paying attention and the EFF would like a word with you. The DMCA is doing exactly what the lobbyists who wrote it wanted it to do.

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I’m sure that BoingBoing is living rich off the settlement from this guy… right?

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Well that was a fun and oddly informative read. Olive oil, huh? I’d have gone with coconut oil, but only because of my deep-seated fear of psychotic naval officers.

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