Adobe Activation comes to Creative Suite products
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 4, 2005 at 12:20am
Adobe continues to extend its Adobe Activation technology, a process designed to ensure that customers have a valid license to install and use the company’s software.
The technology first debuted in March 2003 in Photoshop 7.0.2 for Windows and in Australia only. In October of that year, the first broad rollout saw Adobe Activation extended to Photoshop CS and Creative Suite 1.0 on Windows and in five languages. The first Mac rollout was in February 2004 with the premiere of Photoshop CS Chinese. In May 2004 Premiere Pro 1.5 implemented the technology, followed by Acrobat 7 in December. Today sees Adobe Activation come to the entire Creative Suite family on both the Mac and Windows platforms and in more than 10 languages.
“Adobe Activation is just one component of our overall antipiracy strategy,” Drew McManus, Adobe’s director of worldwide anti-piracy told Macsimum News. “It’s a pretty specific tactic used to combat ‘casual copying,’ which is when one person buys a copy and gives it to all this friends. Or when a business owner buys a copy and installs it on all his systems, regardless of the license. It’s one of the most persuasive forms of piracy and one of the easiest to prevent.”
Customers are informed about Adobe Activation in advance. There’s a “Notice to Users” on product packaging and activation reference on product Web pages and Adobe’s e-commerce store. In addition, there’s an FAQ page online.
“This is a way to ensure that a customer has a fair and active license,” McManus says. “We want to make sure that customers know about Activation, what it is and what we’re doing. At the same time, it’s not really a big deal. It doesn’t’ represent any change in the way we do business or in the way we license products. There’s no change in our philosophy. Adobe Activation just makes sure that customers adhere to the terms of the license to which they’ve always agreed.”
The process follows and implements terms of the existing end-user license agreement (EULA). It’s an interactive representation of the agreement and simply authenticates valid users, McManus says. There’s a tremendous flexibility in the activation process. Customers have a 30-day grace period for full complete use of the products. Activation can be performed over the Internet or by phone. Adobe offers 24/7 support for the automated phone response system in 18 languages. Activation is totally anonymous. The process doesn’t collect, transmit or use any personal data, McManus says.
“Activation just takes a couple of seconds and is totally painless,” he adds. “Adobe doesn’t learn anything about you or your systems. Activation is separate from the registration process, which is still optional. We want to fight piracy and not put an undue burden on the honest customer.”
McManus says that Adobe has been listening to customers regarding the activation process. This has lead to enhancements in license portability and improved technology to prevent occurrence of re-activations. The process seems to be working.
Approximately one-third of all installation attempts are being denied activation, so Adobe feels this indicates piracy prevention. Activation has led to an increased appreciation of the terms of the license agreement and has also been useful in combating other crimes such as credit card fraud, McManus says.
When Adobe Activation was first unveiled, there was some customer resentment, but this seems to be subsiding.
“There’s always a vocal minority of people who are concerned about limitations on what they can do and can’t do,” he says. “But most customers seem to understand what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s sort of become a non-issue at this point.”
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
