If anyone uses any Adobe Creative Cloud products, you may want to reconsider using them. Adobe recently changed its terms of service, which appears to give the company complete access to subscribers’ projects. We have the details.
Companies need terms of service, but unfortunately, they are rarely short and concise documents, so we often just click accept and get on with the job at hand.
However, it has come to light that Adobe has recently made significant changes to their terms of service for the Creative Cloud tools.
The big one in these changes is in section 4.2, which states that users grant a…
“non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content.”
This is a huge problem. For example, if an Adobe user is working under an NDA for a client, it would seem that this gives Adobe access to look at the content created under that NDA, effectively breaking the NDA!
A second concern is that this also seems to give Adobe the ability to use clients’ and users’ content to train Firefly and other AI-based tools. The possibility of generative AI being able to create content based on users’ and clients’ content could quickly become a massive copyright car crash.
There has been a huge outcry. For example designer ‘Wetterschneider’ who works for big names brands including Nike posted this on X…
Here it is. If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files - it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted. pic.twitter.com/LFnBbDKWLC
— Wetterschneider (@Stretchedwiener) June 5, 2024
“If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files - it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted.”
In addition apparently, it isn’t possible to contact Adobe support to clarify these changes, without accepting them first.
AppleInsider said…
“Not giving users the option to easily opt out of submitting work for AI training is a very bad move, especially in the current climate. For a small section of the creative community, Adobe has shot itself in the foot.
The fact that it's impossible to uninstall the apps without agreeing to the terms of service beforehand is baffling. Couple that with the lack of an automatic service cancellation if you click "disagree," and it's an unacceptable combination.”
Two days after Adobe imposed the terms of service on subscribers, they were forced to issue a statement…
“Adobe accesses user content for a number of reasons, including the ability to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features, such as Photoshop Neural Filters and Remove Background in Adobe Express, as well as to take action against prohibited content," the company said at the time. "Adobe does not access, view or listen to content that is stored locally on any user's device.”
Not unsurprisingly, this somewhat unclear statement didn’t help, especially as it didn’t address the topic of AI training. As a result, they issued another statement, which included two phrases…
“Adobe does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content”, and “Adobe will never assume ownership of a customer's work.”
AppleInsider commented on these two statements…
“This is all well and good. The latter wasn't really in question. The former, however, is oddly specific. It's good that they made the statement that they aren't training Firefly with these materials. What would have been better is a blanket statement saying that they won't use it for Firefly, and won't sell or license it to others to train their models. The other generative AI providers complain that properly licensing content to train models is too hard, so they shouldn't have to. Adobe should be clear that they won't allow this.”
All is still unclear, as Adobe’s statements don’t seem to address the possibility that the new terms of service could still breach NDAs that users have signed.
As a team, we have already switched from Adobe products to the suite of products from Affinity and haven’t looked back.