“Cancel Adobe”: Backlash Prompts Corp to Update TOS Again
soulcyclebooks
Adobe is suffering considerable external and internal backlash over their convoluted terms of service update. The one whose plain reading says they get to take ownership of your IP without compensation.
Last week, Photoshop and Substance 3D developer Adobe stole the headlines for all the wrong reasons, getting battered by everyone and their mother for the unpopular General Terms of Use updates, which forced users of Adobe products to provide the company with unlimited access to their projects.
For context, as per the company’s new TOS, they reserve the right to employ automated and manual methods to access and view your creations, a clause many believe the company exploits to gather a large amount of data for training their AI models.
Moreover, the controversy brought attention to section 4.2 of Adobe’s TOS, which states that users grant the company a royalty-free, sublicensable license to “use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate” their creations, cranking the public outrage up to 11.
As reported by Business Insider, which obtained Adobe’s internal Slack discussions, the company’s workers appear to be siding with regular users, voicing complaints about the TOS updates and the resulting backlash, as well as Adobe’s poor communication and apparent mishandling of the situation.
“If our goal is truly to prioritize our users’ best interests (which, to be honest, I sometimes question), it’s astonishing how poor our communication can be,” wrote one Adobe employee. “The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to f*** its users.”
Photo: Smartworks Coworking
“Let’s avoid becoming like IBM, which seems to be surviving primarily due to its entrenched market position and legacy systems,” another member of staff noted.
“Watching the misinformation spread on social media like wildfire is really disheartening. Still, a loud “F*** Adobe’ and ‘Cancel Adobe’ rhetoric is happening within the independent creator community that needs to be addressed.”
The report also indicates that staff have been instructed to avoid directly addressing the current TOS, but rather to refer concerned users to Adobe’s recent blog post, which promises to clarify the controversial points and update the disputed clauses by June 18, yet fails to specify how the Terms of Use will be revised, leaving many users still unhappy.
“At Adobe, there is no ambiguity in our stance, our commitment to our customers, and innovating responsibly in this space,” reads the blog post. “We’ve never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update. That said, we agree that evolving our Terms of Use to reflect our commitments to our community is the right thing to do.”
Photo: Smartworks Coworking
Remember when corporations—at least their PR people—used to talk plainly like normal people instead of space aliens that just landed?
Seriously, Adobe’s statement has enough qualifiers to mortgage a whole neighborhood.
Folks are attributing Adobe’s recent blunder to greed. And that’s likely a factor.
But the depth and breadth of tone deafness on the part of corporate leadership is a newer phenomenon. And it’s spread throughout the permanent managerial class. Everyone from middle management on up now sounds like a kindergarten teacher with a psych BS givingt a TED talk.
The Cancel Adobe movement is acting like this is a bunch of Gordon Gecko types going “Software monopolies are for broke billionaires. Trillionaires do covert IP theft!”
If only.
Nope, the real problem is much worse and more insidious. Because the 1980s corproate raider types knew, on some level, that they were screwing over their own people to make a fast buck. They told lies to hand wave away their sins. But on some level, they knew their behavior was destructive.
The current crop of rootless mercenary rent seekers really do think they’re doing the right thing. They don’t see the customers as “their people.” Ever since the managerial class converted en masse to the Death Cult, they’ve beomce an aloof, isolated culture apart from the rest of us.
Nor are incompetence and malice mutually exclusive. Keep in mind that not only has merit-based promotion fallen into disfavor in the corporate world, it is now illegal in many jurisdictions.
Combine a weird, alien, insular class of managers and executives with a magical thinking cargo cult, and it makes sense why megacorps brazenly violate property rights, planes burst into flames on takeoff, and the ice cream machine is always broke.
The bad news is there’s no dislodging these wacko Death Cultists until their perches of power collapse under them. So it’s gonna get even more interesting soon.
Good news: Indie and open source make it easier than ever to divest yourself of megacorp spyslop. Cut the cord. Go independent today.
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