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nareka13710949
nareka13710949
Participant
May 3, 2019
Question

PSD format licensing

  • May 3, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 2215 views

Hello,

The problem is that Adobe hasn't documented licensing for using .psd file format.

Today I discussed with the stuff of Adobe developers and other departments and they proofed that they don't have licensing document.

They suggest me to post about licensing document here and maybe they will take a look for that, so this is what I am doing.

Dear licensing team of Adobe please create the document of licensing .psd file format for commercial and other types of usages.

Regards,

Narek Aydinyan

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    janakporwal
    janakporwal
    Participant
    February 16, 2022

     @nareka13710949  : Did you ever find out the licensing terms? I was a bit unsure about open source tools strictly being meticulous about the psd format licensing terms - but given that Corel Draw also allows PSD import: https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/psd-file/  it seems a new tool is permitted to allow PSD read / write. 

     

    However, legally - someone else is doing it is not a valid justification to escape from charges of doing something illegal. I also came across an article / website of a book releaed a decade or two ago that contained the PSD file format specification and the book itself had the CC something license.

     

     

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 3, 2019

    Adobe Photoshop File Formats Specification

    They may not have a licensing document, but Adobe published the description to the PSD file format and there are 3rd party implementations reading and writing PSD files, including the open source Gimp.

    I do not think that you need more than this to implement a PSD reader/writer program.

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
    nareka13710949
    nareka13710949Author
    Participant
    May 6, 2019

    I agree but also don't agree. I saw that document but like Gimp there are FFMpeg and ImageIO which give 3rd party API. But licensing for those may restrict commercial use. I would like to know the licensing, especially for commercial use. The document you cite doesn't mention if I can use those APIs for commercial use.

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 6, 2019

    Yes, I agree with you that it looks like free for commercial use too, but the problem is that there are no certain terms for handling such licensing issues. I spoke to Adobe developers and they advised me to write about this in forums. They told, it's likely they will add some document for handling such issues in the future.


    Well, Adobe developer misguided you to this forum, as it is not a legal platform to find the information you look for. This is (basically) a user to user forum with some Adobe participation to solve technical problems. My final advice is to write to Adobe by snail mail.

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
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