Adobe is a rotten company -or- Evil applications of copyright law.
Posted by Steve Jamieson in Copyright, RantsWhen dealing with large corporations, logical assumptions do not often apply—either because of incompetence, or tyrannical greed. Case in point…
A couple months ago, my church bought a font (or rather a license to use a font) from Adobe to use in all of our publications in order give everything a simple, uniform, attractive appearance. Part of my internship involves generating new teaching materials, so I need to use that font. Since Adobe fonts come with a 5-user license, and the font was only being used on two computers at the church, I figured that I would become user number three under the license, and that I’d just have to instal the Mac version of the font. Unfortunately, the church didn’t have the Mac version on hand. Nevertheless, since we have a multi-user license, I assumed that I would just have to contact Adobe to find out how to acquire the appropriate files under our existing license. Oh, what a wrong assumption that was! The licenses that Adobe sells apply on a platform-dependent basis, rather than on a cross-platform basis. That is, the license that the Church owns applies only to the Windows version of the font. Thus, in order to get the font installed on my one computer, the church would have to buy another 5-user license—a 5-user license for the Mac version. I don’t know about you, but I find that to be absolutely ridiculous.
I didn’t want to bother the customer service rep that I was talking to with the issue, so I got the customer service supervisor, Nicole, on the phone. However, she just got snooty and told me, “that’s the way it’s always been”, as if tradition somehow justifies a stupid business practice that discriminates against small businesses running cross-platform computing environments. I asked Nicole to talk to her supervisor, but she informed me that I’d have to schedule a call back. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere even if I worked my way up to President and CEO Bruce Chizen himself, so I gave up. Far be it from a giant corporation with lots of lawyers to offer flexible licensing options to its small customers. In the parlance of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, “Arrr! Those scurvy bilge rats oughtt’walk t’plank!”
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In their defense, they are probably “selling” two different products, as the development of each platform font happens somewhat independently. However, it makes sense to me that the font program installer is just installing very similar files on the two platforms. Either way, its a sucky way to deal with customers.
Is there a way to move the font files across? Or at least imbed them in a blank document that you turn into a stationary file to start all your writing.
In some sense they are selling two products. The Mac and Windows versions are not identical sequences of bits. However, much of the development, I imagine, is shared. After all, both versions use the same glyphs. The difference comes in how the data for those glyphs is arranged and stored. That’s a pretty small distinction, even if it requires a significant amount of work.
I’m reminded of the fiasco between Apple and retail stores when the five flavor iMacs were first released. At first, Apple sold them to retailers only in multi-packs with a fixed color ratio. Each pack contained more of the popular colors like Blueberry, and fewer of the less popular colors like Tangerine. However, the color ratio wasn’t a perfect match to actual demand. If I recall correctly, demand for Blueberry over Tangerine was often much greater than the ratio within the packs, so retailers had to keep ordering more packs of iMacs just to get the Blueberry, while the Tangerines piled up in the stock room. Naturally, the retailers had a fit, because Apple wasn’t allowing the individual retailers to customize the color ratio within the packs to meet their specific stocking needs.
Are Blueberry and Tangerine iMacs different products? In some sense, yes, but the distinction is weak. They have different colored cases, but the electronics inside are the same, so they both “do” the same thing. I’m sure plenty of time and money went into the development of each color, but that doesn’t justify being restrictive about the ratio in which retailers can acquire them.
This situation with Adobe is similar. Adobe is selling 5-packs of Frutiger, but it’s only selling packs with 100% “flavor” ratios. The two different versions may have different “cases” (file formats), but they both “do” the same thing—display and print my text in a font face designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1968 for the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Regardless, I may have found a work-around. I did some Googling yesterday, and I found some utilities that claim to convert fonts between Windows and Mac formats. Fortunately, the Adobe font license specifically allows the user to modify the font files. The only restrictions with respect to doing so are that the converted font cannot be distributed, and that each computer using the converted font counts towards the number of computers allowed by the license. (Section 2.6.4) However, those are restrictions that I can live with.