Here's what happened: On Thursday, someone claiming to be a business representative from Adobe called me, roughly stating that the images I created for the official website of the company I currently work for were made using Adobe Photoshop. However, this company has not purchased an Adobe software license under its corporate name, and the Adobe Creative Cloud Pro plan I subscribed to is an individual version, which is strictly for personal use and cannot be used to create images for commercial companies. The caller emphasized that if the company wishes to use these images, it must purchase an Adobe software license from them in the company's name.
As a legitimate paying Adobe user with a continuous subscription for nearly a decade, her statement completely overturned my long-standing understanding of Adobe's software licensing terms. In my industry experience, only free trial versions of software typically restrict the commercial use of images created during the trial period, and such images usually come with software watermarks.
As a legitimate paying Adobe user with a continuous subscription for nearly a decade, her statement completely overturned my long-standing understanding of Adobe's software licensing terms. In my industry experience, only free trial versions of software typically restrict the commercial use of images created during the trial period, and such images usually come with software watermarks.
What's even more outrageous is that the next day (Friday), another person claiming to be a Compliance Manager from Adobe called again, with an extremely tough attitude. Her remarks made me increasingly doubt whether they are indeed Adobe employees (in hindsight, should I have recorded the call to preserve evidence?). Initially, she repeated the same argument as the caller the previous day, but after I sent her the records of my consultation with Adobe's official customer service (the customer service representative stated that the individual version can be used for commercial creation.), she immediately changed her story. She claimed that employees of my company were using a pirated version of Acrobat Reader to view PDF documents, infringing on Adobe's rights and interests.
I immediately informed her that Acrobat Reader is free software, but to my surprise, she retorted that "Acrobat Reader is only free for Adobe paying subscribers"—could my understanding of Acrobat Reader being "free" all these years have been wrong? Finally, she made it clear that the purpose of the call was to negotiate: if our company is willing to cooperate with them, the matter will be dropped; if not, they will pursue legal action to protect their rights.
So I'm now very confused: Did I miss a notification about changes to Adobe's software licensing policy, or have I encountered a new type of fraud ring? I'm posting here to verify and ask if other community members have encountered similar situations?
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