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Better not go on vacation or Adobe DRM will get you!
December 1, 2009 | 7:34 pm
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By Paul Biba
Received an email telling me that December 15 is the last day that you can migrate your ACS3 protected PDF files from Adobe Acrobat/Reader 6 or 7 to Adobe Digital Editions and make them ACS4 protected files. If you miss this date then you will still be able to read your files on your current machine, but if something happens to it you will loose the ability to read your files.
Here is the posting from the Adobe forums website:
As was posted in on our Content Server 3 migration page, on Dec. 15th we will be decommissioning the old activation server that was used for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader (versions 6 through 7).
This will not have any impact on your ability to read content using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader on existing machines, but will mean that you will not be able to migrate content from Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader to Adobe Digital Editions or to other machines.
If you wish to be able to access your content in the future, please install Adobe Digital Editions and authorize it to an AdobeID.
Isn’t that just wonderful. I wonder how many people are going to looe their files because they were on vacation, didn’t understand what Adobe is talking about, or just didn’t know this was happening. Hooray for DRM!
Related: Horror Mall: Scary e-books—without DRM fright.
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Comments:
DRM is just fantastic isn’t it! And, after repeated infringements of people’s rights of ownership such as this, they ask us to trust them when they won’t trust us!
Consumers of digital content need to raise up in revolt and refuse to buy anything that requires an activation server in order to be used now or in the future. And that includes schemes like the Kindle that allow you to read without a connection on your current device but will require you to connect anytime you need to move to a new reading device.
My favorite horror story was the one about the baseball fans who bought streaming video of various baseball games from Major League Baseball. Some spent massive amounts of money. Then, without much warning, MLB announced that they were moving to a different system and were turning off the activation servers. People screamed bloody murder but were just told to read the fine print. Even after spending hundreds of dollars they had zero long term rights to the content they believed they were “buying”.
There have been dozens of other similar cases. Things right now are badly out of balance. Copyright was never intended to provide 100% of the benefit to content owners. But DRM that works through remote authentication servers gives content owners complete and absolute control over the content that the consumer is spending sizable sums to “acquire”.
Just to be clear this was a two weeks notice for something that we publicly announced over a year ago and provided a clear migration path at the time of announcement.