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After Effects 7 – Start to worry
Product activation needs to be feared. As a freelancer who works on-site, thus frequently without an internet connection, I have been twice caught out by their faulty activation software.
Imagine your face when you open PremierPro, PhotoShopCS and sometime soon After Effects 7 and they ALL require REACTIVATION. Fine if you have an internet connection, or you are within office hours. But step outide those areas and you can be faced with a ‘ring back on Monday’ situation. Or at best spend twenty minutes in the street with your mobile and a laptop tapping in serial numbers and activation codes for ALL of the above. Even then you need to find a help desk in a country that is open to activate the MPEG encoder in PremierPro.
The above situation is not fantasy, it happens. If you are not prepared to have your business look like a joke because you cannot open your software, then please use this forum to tell Adobe that their faulty activation software will not be tolerated.
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8 Replies
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I’m not sure what the problem is? When you freelance, you end up at a place where their software is not activated? Why would this be the case if they purchased the license to use the software? They only have to activate it once. Isn’t that the case for ALL software, you only have to activate it once, don’t you?
Arie
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Why is there a panic about it?
I have to call Microsoft all the time for XP activations and they never “UNREGISTER” on me.
I’ve installed FAR more adobe software licenses than any Pro user will ever legally neer to, and I’ve never seen any of their software un-activate itself on a whim. I personally like the activation’s being there.
It keeps a lot of cheap users out there from pirating inexpensive ($1000 – $1500 is within any working professional’s budget) software in an easy fashion. If you keep it difficult, you cut down on the piracy, and guarantee future price drops for us in the future.
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Let’s see: When I first bought After Effects, it was $2,400 as I recall. It came with almost no built-in plug-ins. It required you to buy Effects Packs One & Two which were another $700 and $600, respectively. It had a dongle and, if I remember correctly, one of the effects packs also had a dongle. I paid a lot of money to have a program that did far, far less than what After Effects does today. It dropped in price and increased in features as legitimate users bought copies. Eventually there were enough copies that they dropped the dongle scheme and relied on their legitimate user base to support the R&D.
If putting up with activation schemes is what is necessary to further continue Adobe’s drop in pricing while increasing AE’s feature set, I can put up with it.
Your mileage may vary,
Ron Lindeboom
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Thank you all for your replies.
But I am amazed by the complacency.
I move myself, my laptop and my software around the world. The hardware in the laptop does not change, but on occasion Adobe activated products imagine that it has.
Talking to Adobe support centres they questioned whether I had wireless internet or not. I got the feeling that numerous i.p. locations may affect the activation retention process?
I am aware that Adobe uses .tmp files as part of its activation system, why should this be considered an acceptable way to operate? Do we have to leave our machines cluttered with .tmp files lest we erase the vital one?
A thread in your replies was the prevention of piracy. I have two thoughts on this, in five minutes I would defy anyone to be unable to find cracked software. So the thieves will steal no matter how difficult the activation process is. I would imagine that the harder the software is to crack the greater the incentive to the hackers.
Secondly, like yourselves I have bought all this software. That is why I am livid that when I try to use it I am prevented from doing so by activation software that is of no practical use as the cracked versions are out there. Thieves may be to blame but we pay the price!http://www.toadovision.co.uk/boxes
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I think the trend towards activation is partly due to the fact that it is manifestly a technological measure protecting the software and so brings in the DRM provisions of the DMCA and EU Copyright Directive. This would allow Adobe arguably greater protection than that which the underlying copyright in the software provides (the EU copyright directive, for instance, provides legal protection against all activities not authorised by the rightholder – this is particularly useful where the company runs up against a bypassing tool that is capable of legitimate uses and so usually not liable for copyright infringements.)
As far as I understand it, Adobe also gives you a 30 day grace period whenever the software deactivates, so it’s not so bad for consumers.
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Hello Kieran,
I am no legal eagle so I cannot comment on the indicated directives.
However I can assure you that Adobe does not allow software to run beyond the 30 day grace period. The upshot of this is that if your software requires re-activation at any time after 30 days following the original activation, it will not function at all, until reactivation.
Additionally I downloaded the Photoshop CS2 demo whilst I waited for mine to arrive. This worked fine. BUT when I re-formated my C: drive and re-installed the CS2 demo it claimed my 30 day period was up. But only sixteen days had actually expired. My clock is correct. Adobe informed me that the software will only install once, even within the 30 day period.
Following that I de-installed CS2 and installed CS1, CS1 activated fine but would not install RAW camera support because of a ‘remnant’ file from CS2. The only way to get that to work was to copy an entire back-up folder to my reformatted drive.
Again the activation software was at fault by claiming the demo period was up.
The activation software is faulty in many ways and needs to be fixed or scraped. -
Arie, this is Charles Lee Peeler. I’m a former student of yours. Did you see my post on pixelation in my NLE?
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