My understanding is that American courts apply a reasonableness test to these “contracts”, so this wording is actually a good thing for the user. It’s so blatantly unreasonable, so early, that it should void the whole thing.
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The binding arbitration found in many of these agreements would prevent you from entering a courtroom where legal standards for reasonableness could be applied.
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It seems a trivial thing, but perhaps important. Contracts that cannot be examined before entering cannot be enforced. At least, I don’t think so. IANAL and all that.
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Kind of. This would probably fall under what’s known as a “Click-Wrap Agreement” (From “Shrink-Wrap”, EULAs held within shrink-wrapped packaging), which are generally held as enforceable, if there is a way to view the agreement before you agree to it.
In order to be deemed to have accepted the terms of service, the purchaser must be put on notice that certain terms of service may apply. If the terms of service are not visible and/or accessible, courts have found the notice requirement to be lacking and as such, the purchaser may not be bound to the terms of the agreement.
(Emphasis mine)
So if you can’t read the agreement first, the agreement is generally held to be unenforceable. However in this case, it probably means that while the updated agreement is unenforceable, you are still bound by the earlier agreement.
(I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, please take this advice as suppositions on the part of a layman, with a Morton’s Salt Company warehouse of salt)
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That catch-22, that’s really quite some catch, isn’t it?
please, Affinity, improve your software to the point i can tell these bastards to f-k off, forever. because it’s pretty close…
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I learned Photoshop years ago, and these days I use the totally free Paint (dot) net (EDIT: had to edit the name since the editor is trying to turn it into a link… here’s the actual link: https://www.getpaint.net/) program which has an Adobe-like interface (like circa 2000 Photoshop I mean). Once you start installing all the add-ins and filters you can get for it (also free), it becomes a worthy successor and every bit as easy to use.
Putting on my Software Licensing professional hat (it’s what I do for a living these days), for small companies and individual creators, this is a HUGE problem. You should always be able to read the agreement before you agree to it and, as one person said, this is not enforceable. We’re large enough that we negotiate our contracts outside of the normal Adobe purchasing structure, but even we have to deal with the fuckery that is Adobe on a regular basis when they decide its time to change things up
“Here’s the new contract. As long as every computer connects to the internet, your program will work!”
“We have thousands of computers in non-internet connected secure facilities, though.”
“Yeah, but no worries, as long as they can connect to the internet, you’re good.”
Seriously. We’ve had that conversation with them. And it’s taken them a YEAR to fix the issue, and the convoluted work arounds they’ve provided us over the past twelve months rarely worked.
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How about “By requiring my agreement to an unread Terms of Use, Adobe agrees to my unpublished, unread Terms of Usership, and agrees that the Terms of Usership have precedence of the Terms of Use.” ?
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I believe that the standard is actually “unconscionable” rather than “unreasonable.” That is a MUCH higher bar. So you can’t agree to sell yourself into slavery, but you can be legally bound to all sorts of agreements that are obviously not in your long term interest, or indeed, ones that you would have agreed to if you had read it.
Several times, I got into arguments about agreeing to terms of service at work. The tech support guy would just say “click on ‘I agree’,” and I would say “I have no authority to bind the government to that contract.”
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Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS
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That’s just it, though. They don’t actually have you over a barrel. It might seem that way, but it ain’t so.
I’d like to second the poster above that said: FUCK ADOBE!
CS3 still works fine if you can live with Snow Leopard.
That depends on how you look at it.
The company I work for has been using Photoshop for our client files for over eight years now. That’s thousands of files that are tied to the platform. (Yes, I know other programs can open PSDs, but…)
Most of the files created in the last several years also make extensive use of smart objects and shared Adobe Library images. Features that save us time and make great sense for shared files that need to maintain consistency. A lot of programs don’t handle adobe smart objects well, if at all. Never mind the Adobe Libraries.
One new client we just took on starting this month (who would have thought?) has their required font only available through Adobe Fonts.
Lastly, our workflow requires many JPGs and PNGs be made from those PSD files each month, and the Adobe Generator makes that process far easier than it used to be before that tool was added to Photoshop. Especially with the number of client changes that happen after a task is thought to be completed. Without Generator running in the background, automatically exporting the files we need as they are changed, we would have to do them manually and what happens seamlessly right now would take up to 15 minutes additionally per task. That’s also not taking into account errors that are caught during proofing that would also need to be re-exported.
Last year around August I started looking for an Adobe alternative that would do as much of what we needed as possible and ran across Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher.
Those can do a lot of what we need, and with some process changes AD can even do something similar to what we can do with Adobe Generator. Additionally, they are “buy once” software instead of rental software like Adobe, and the cost was low enough that all three could be bought for less than the price of 3 months of what we pay Adobe.
Also, with the last update AD added smart object support, so that’s even better.
My plan was to switch as much of what we do to AD by February of this year.
But then we hit snags; our production manager quit and rather than replace him, the owner split his duties between me and another manger, with me taking on the bulk of managing our production teams and process, while also still doing my original job.
At the same time, we brought on nine large clients that had to be onboarded, have new assets created, etc. I’ve been overloaded ever since.
Due to that, my focus has not been able to return to the graphics department process and getting away from Adobe.
As you say, I’m not over a barrel if I just walk away. But then I’ll have different problems.
As long as I have this stupid job that I loathe but require, I’m over Adobe’s barrel.
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You’re right. Sorry, I was assuming personal use, not biz.
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Oh, absolutely. If I only needed it for personal use, they could fuck right off.
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I wonder if Recursive terms of service agreement is co-morbid with Recursive attorney disorder?
From the Gnomon Chronicles:
“Recursive attorney disorder is a legal and psychological disorder in which an attorney requires the services of another attorney, who in turn requires the services of another attorney, and so on indefinitely.”
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