The Verge:
Forever 21 has been pirating Photoshop, according to a new lawsuit from Adobe, and it’s facing serious fines as a result. The suit was filed yesterday in California District Court, alleging that Forever 21 pirated 63 different instances of Adobe software including copies of Photoshop, Acrobat, and Illustrator. Autodesk and Corel also joined Adobe in the suit, based on pirated copies of Autodesk, WinZip and PaintShopPro, among others. According to the complaint, Forever 21 “continued their infringing activities even after being contacted by Adobe regarding the infringement.”
How the heck did Adobe find out about this? Was there a whistleblower inside Forever 21?
Piracy of Photoshop is one of the reason it’s so sucessfull. Piracy has helped to create a base of educated users with experience in a prgram they could never afford. Also, when I was in print, I noticed that those who could afford photshop paid for it, but many designers/agencies would buy some licenses and use PS on a number of machines, or buy licenses only every three years and use a pirated version to update the other two. Piracy in the industry helped people to afford Photoshop and helped Adobe to become the defacto standard in photo editing. I’m not condning it, and if they recieved a warning, they should have done something about it. Me? I use Pixelmator.
“How the heck did Adobe find out about this? Was there a whistleblower inside Forever 21?”
Yes, probably through BSA, the “business software alliance.” They encourage disgruntled (former) employees to report on companies using unlicensed software. (I went through this at a company I worked for after someone who got fired reported them; in the end, the focus was on user licenses for Exchange and copies of Acrobat.)
I’ve often wondered how feasible it would be to watermark images in a way that is unnoticeable by the human eye. Seems like you could bump R, G and B values slightly and encode stuff like the license number and other data. Then Adobe just needs a crawler that accumulates images and an offline process to spot those watermarks.
Although it’s most likely an (ex-)employee that’s reported them, there’s the potential that it’s unauthorised copies pinging home from a static IP. Many companies own their own static IP addresses for use within the company so it wouldn’t be difficult to track down violations coming from those locations. Whether there is any code to send licensing information back to Adobe is not something I know for sure, but I wouldn’t put it past them. Hopefully we’ll find out the full truth when the lawsuit goes to court.
I had to google Forever 21 as I had no idea what it was but now that I see it is a clothing store, I am amazed. This company likely suffers greatly from theft and they are doing the same!
Over $4G in sales and they could not pay $100K for software?
Please don’t steal.
We used to call Pirated copies extended demos. Then, we would learn the software, and buy it once we were in the trade.
I wonder how prevalent stealing one’s main tools is in other industries.
Watermarking software already does that. Some of it survives printing and rescanning too.
You can get a hefty student discount on Adobe software. Even the creative cloud offers a 60% discount for students. So there is really no excuse.
WinZip?
WINZIP?
7Zip is free and better, for the love of God.
(Using PaintShopPro is bad enough; stealing it, when you’re a giant company rather than some penniless aspiring artist?
They deserve to be sued.)
Yeah.
I got a graphic design degree, and had student copies of Photoshop and Illustrator (and the late lamented Freehand).
I have a lot of sympathy for the student or amateur or just-starting artist or designer who couldn’t afford hundreds of dollars even for a student license.
(This has changed a lot with the CC licensing and the student discounts there…)
But I have no sympathy for a company or an established designer not paying for their tools.
Forever 21 is one of the sleaziest retailers in clothing. They’ve had over 50 copyright lawsuits thrown at them. They have a history of stealing other peoples work, so why would anyone be surprised at this?
not everyone has time or money to be a student for life. There is always an “excuse” though not always a legal reason…
It is possible that random people at said company decided to install some “available” copies of Adobe’s software on their machines… with out management (maybe even without IT) knowing. I do think much of their software can “ping home”. Even back in the mide/late 90s, when you would have a separate license key for each install, if you have two copies with the same key running, on the same network – it would notify you that “your” copy was already running on “Xs machine” …
$4G = 4 grand = $4000 = nothing… ? or $4B … for billion? or $400M? Random letters?
Forever 21 will be paying for the software, forever!!!!
Yes, for profit entities should pay for the tools they use to generate their revenue. Many business are not run like a business, so they just want to get away with whatever they think they can … cheap computers (that fail) and “free” software that everyone can download … for FREE!!!
The student packages used to be cheap before the cloud (and consider it’s a perpetual license and I believe they don’t care if you use it post-graduation). I think the basic Design Standard suite with Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign came out to $250 as a digital download on Amazon.
For a design student, that’s the “textbook” fee and arguably much more functional. A lot of arguments for piracy exist but honestly there is little reason to past a certain point. For those who can afford it, it’s a long-term investment in themselves. For those who can’t, don’t brag about piracy as if you’re doing Adobe a favor.
Adobe might be some increasingly evil corporate entity but it makes a pretty consistent product. I gotta admit, they feel stagnant at times but the stuff works. Think of these fees as dues paid to a bunch of designers and engineers working on a good product–to have any design respected, it should first be running on legitimate software that doesn’t send a hypocritical vibe.
If not, there is Inkscape, Pixelmator, Affinity Designer, and some others. But these are sort of secondary options for casual fun. No doubt you can get work done on them but it’s a potential layer of incompatibilities.
Adobe knows piracy exists. I feel their solution is the cloud which somewhat recaptures via subscription plans lost sales by piracy or those who buy like CS6 and hold onto it forever. If they can’t get the invisible, then might as well tap into the group with hands tied into whatever Adobe chooses to implement.
Anyways, a business or anyone that profits from designs made on Adobe products should pay. I bet Forever 21 prints a lot of banners and ads and did not use Word to set them up.
G is the ISO standard for 10**9