What the heck do you expect someone to do?

[R Neil Haugen]

There's a court filing by Dolby somewhere that has been posted elsewhere. When you are credibly threatened with legal suit by a large company over the continued use of their product in yours, what the heck do you expect someone to do?

So ... when Dolby requires Adobe to immediately stop allowing use or access of "their property" ... in this case, coding to process ac3 audio ... do you expect Adobe to simply ignore the legalities of the situation?

And ... in that case ... I'm trying to figure out why Adobe is to blame here. Dolby is the company requiring Adobe shut off access or use of anything whatever relating to ac3 in their product (PrPro). Why aren't you complaining to or about Dolby? Would seem at least logical. Or at the very least, acknowledging this is a two-party dance and allotting the blame between them.

Neil

[Louis Peluso]

wait so dolby is bigger than adobe? give me a break. this is a standoff over licensing fees. adobe as the little guy being picked on by goliath dolby is silly. do what has to be done so u dont screw over your customers and cut the garbage about mysterious magic guys in dark suits. i have multiple law firms working for my company. they do what i tell them.

[Louis Peluso]

the entity thats going to be blamed is the one contracted by the end user. aka adobe. this isnt a pr issue this is a functionality issue and nobody chooses dolby off the shelf- they choose adboe. and right now right at this moment, adobe is the only choice and looks like it will be for the future. but then ibm, microsoft, netscape and corel thought the same thing and we all know how that worked out for them. fix this and stop the spin.

[R Neil Haugen]

First, I'm not an Adobe staffer. Second, that ain't spin. And the people on the PrPro team wouldn't have had a say in the matter at all. That would have been up the line in Adobe Corporate.

Your thoughts on how legal systems and lawsuits work is certainly interesting. So, if Adobe is the larger company, they can just ignore some one else's property/legal rights? Somehow, I'm not thinking that would play well in court.

Neil

[Louis Peluso]

i didnt say u were. it sounded enough like spin to qualify. happy talk which solves nothing. people come here for solutions because many of their incomes depend on it. adobe makes these forums the main source of such discussion and so here we are.

If you are not a representative of adobe, but just a gadlfy (welmeaning or not) im not going to waste my key strokes explaining to you what i meant by my "legal theories" or anything else. I wish i had time on my hands to put on an adobe tech costume and pretend to be helpful in the forums but im busy. my main complaint is that they should fix their mistake. This is, as i now know by research, a dispute over allegedly unpaid licensing fees.

adobe should do whats needed to not screw over their customers and work out the economics of that with dobly off stage instead of betting that the small number of users screwed over arent going to make a big enough stink.

which is why im here. have a nice day, i dont come here to fight. but im not here to experience the forum version of being shipped oversees for customer support who can only waste people's time. if enough people scream from the rooftops, they will do the right thing. being soothed by a gadly  doesnt make my footage work in premiere.

[darinh]

Exactly. Adobe needs to put customers first, not in the middle of a dispute.

Why am I not having this same issue with my Avid Media Composer software running on the same system? 

[Louis Peluso]

avid is probably in compliance with their licensing fees

[R Neil Haugen]

Totally agree it's a mess. I'm one of the people who typically have kept back versions of the CC apps installed so I can always work an older process in its original version. As long as I'm on this build install of the Windows OS, I can probably keep that. Occasionally in the past I've had to re-install an OS ... and at that point, things get dicey. One can copy everything from the Program/Package file area to another drive, and copy it back ... and it might work. Sometimes does.

But ... very well might not. At which point, my 2014 projects have to be upgraded whether I want to or not. Not going to be something I'll be happy about. I've only had a few ac3 files that I had but due to my Win7 install disk getting to the point it wouldn't allow another install, and MS wasn't giving out any assistance, I had to upgrade to 10, which ... has actually worked well. Thankfully that was before the mess with Dolby.

Having looked through the online references about the lawsuit, the hassle seems to be that Dolby wants raw access to all the data on users of Adobe CC programs in order to "ensure" compliance with licensing. The agreement had been on the legally published licenses numbers. So Dolby wanted a change ... which would have given their financial people access to pretty much every financial data of Adobe. And they wanted that on a continuing basis from their own sites, full password access ... meaning they wanted to be able to monitor the internal financial data of Adobe on a daily basis.

Adobe is a "publicly held" company ... so for stock purposes, they are audited regularly by stock-exchange types and if their published numbers for things like licenses are not accurate, that's fraud ... stock fraud. Criminal law. Gets very nasty fast for companies that do that. So I'd gather the folks at Adobe corporate aren't that intimidated about Dolby's questioning the licensing stats. They'd better not be playing with those or someone/s at Adobe would have immediate legal liability. I would guess the public stats are pretty accurate.

From their reaction, such as it is ... I would also guess that they're not that happy about Dolby's demands to have full and constant access to all Adobe's financials from Dolby's accounting department, which is part of the suit: complete password access to all Adobe financials. To use that data to determine the "true" licenses from the internal financials.

Especially with Dolby having such close corporate connection with a rival or two. And the same folks at Dolby watching Adobe's financials would also be dealing with the rival companies.

Under that circumstance, I'd probably not be particularly happy with the demand either. But then, I also find (as an outsider but 40+ years of running a business now) Dolby's sudden decision to question Adobe's licensing numbers ... as something rather questionable. If they've got proof, file it with the stock exchanges Adobe trades on. This suit looks more like a negotiating ploy of some kind to me. A fishing expedition or something.

But what do I know, anyway? Just being an old cynic ...

Neil

[davids76360283]

So the last AC-3 patent expired in Feb. 2017. Why would adobe remove it from their programs 8 months later? Isnt it free now?

[R Neil Haugen]

One would think, right? But there's trademarks & several other things involved somehow. So getting the internal ac3 support out seems to have been an emergency process, rather rushed, pushed again from a guess by corporate legal. 'Twas some sort of scouring of the code for any Dolby related items or something. Rather beyond my ken.

Not something us mere users are going to be informed about it seems.

But isn't speculation fun, for cynical old folks?

Neil

[Peferling]

But isn't speculation fun, for cynical old folks?

Or rather, it's a curse as one wakes up in the Matrix to realize that Beer isn't real.  Anyway, I've demoed and continue to demo all the other applications and I swear they're made by the same source because nothings perfect.  Oh, yeah.  "People" wrote the code. I have more years than I like to admit in using these applications; they meet my needs regardless.

Fence jumpers, other than risking torn trousers, won't find the grass green on the other side for very long.  Some upgrade will leave them back where they started.  Cruise their forums to know why.  My best advice is to pick what works and stick with it, avoiding all temptations to upgrade and be the new beta test boy.

[R Neil Haugen]

Rather wise, that. Strange how many people just assume the grass is greener.

Neil

[Louis Peluso]

as i said, ibm, microsoft, corel and many others used to feel the same way. hoping to remain the only game in town is a bad business plan

[Peferling]

as i said, ibm, microsoft, corel and many others

The problem is not in a name, (bricks and motar).  It's about the people.  When key people retire or leave, so goes the intelligence that kept things running effectively and company takes on a new personality, quite literally.  As an engineer and producer, I've work closely with such people, (and it's seldom those at the top) and when they leave? I polish up my resume because I know what's coming.    If you look into the demise of many companies, you'll find this to be true 90% of the time.

In this business, it's a unique combination of end user talent as well.  I try to be nice but many folks simply should not be doing this form of work if they expect Adobe (or any other company) to make it work for them.  It's a system thing.  You need to know the internal workings of your PC and the hardware, (or pay someone else who does).  Your clients are the assuming the same of you.

When I tell folks not to upgrade?  This is just one more example why.  It's their business.

[jmcg2222]

So, yeah -> I know the internal workings of my PC and hardware so well precisely because I've been and Adobe user for so many years! When the Suite was on discs and I managed a lab, we had to figure out how to make images of clean OS's for all the boxes because you always had to start with a clean OS for the newest version. Funny how I learned so much about computers because I've always been a Premiere guy.

Like so many others, I wait until the absolute last possible minute to upgrade Premiere. Premiere is a program I love and I will continue to use it - but would have been nice for them to be out front on this - to say something like "hey we're ending this thing in x months and here's what you need to do to be prepared" instead of always sending us scrambling to the forums.

[ProDesignTools]

It's OK to upgrade, but waiting a bit usually doesn't hurt and never upgrade mid-project if you can help it.

Plus, video pros especially have got to make sure to keep the previous version(s) installed on your production machines, and continue to open/save existing projects with the same versions they were originally created with.

Make sure you keep backups of all your project files (especially if trying to migrate them forward), as well as backups of the CC offline installers, where possible.

Finally, it's best to proceed cautiously and do some testing of any new release (of any software anywhere) before moving up to it, and not just jump right in... If this is possible on a second or separate system, so much the better.

Updating and backing up project files: Best practices

[R Neil Haugen]

There's no one on the Adobe development team that I've talked with at NAB or MAX that has any assumption whatever about being the only game, and to me, that's an odd comment. Between Avid, Sony Vegas, FCP, and Resolve ... besides others ... they are all very aware of the other apps and how they function at least in general. Some of course have more experience with another app than others.

No one can attend the big conferences like NAB & IBC without walking by the massive booths for the other apps. The Hollywood section of the PrPro team of course works with people that are rather more experienced in Avid, and must know how folks coming from that app can slide into working with PrPro, as training and facilitating those teams into PrPro is their job. Several of the main presentations at the Adobe booth at NAB were about the process of going from cutting a long-form in Avid into Adobe apps.

Now ... how much upper management shakes loose for development budgeting is naturally something one wonders about.

Neil

[Richard M Knight]

More speculation....

In the old perpetual licence days it was easy for Adobe to tell Dolby how many licences were needed. everybody who owned Premiere or AME were using it. Now in the CC age how many CC owners use Premiere? A lot of Photoshop/ Illustrator uses have the CC package but never use Premiere or need the Dolby codecs, I wonder if this is the sticking point on usage between Adobe and Dolby?

[R Neil Haugen]

Could be something like that. Whatever, the "solution" proposed by Dolby would be unacceptable to most companies I would think.

Neil

[herve_menu]

Simply, give us the dolby encoder back.

The scandal is that adobe did inform you that is fonction no more existe when you update.

[R Neil Haugen]

Sorry, can't give anybody anything, just a peer user.

Though the lack of full information at the time of release was a real disaster. Most certainly.

Neil

[kkey1978]

AVS4U supports it, you would think Premiere would. For now I am running the files through AVS4U's Audio Converter and then pulling the audio back into my Premiere project. Hard to believe that a much cheaper program has that capability, but Premiere does not.

[Peferling]

Meeting the bottom line of share holder value.  Welcome to USA, Inc.  (Kinda of wake up call for some, I guess). 

I suppose they had no choice.  The issue is how they implemented that choice, and Karma is prize they earned for doing it.

I recommend that folks try not to use others/employees here as a punching bag.  Yes it was a sucker punch, and you will pick yourself up and jump back into the ring, (if that means using another solution.  So be it).  However, some of these folks use this software for their own needs, are most certainly impacted in uneasy way, (it's their job on the line), and are in the same boat.

I still have 2014.2, 2015.3 with 2018.  Never upgrade unless it functionally necessary.  Always keep older versions to support old projects.  Remember, this is not just software, it's a system.  I've said this repeatedly.  Like throwing mud, some of it's gotta stick.

[R Neil Haugen]

Yup.