Users grew upset last week when an Adobe pop-up notified them of updates to the terms of use, which seemed to grant Adobe broad permissions to access user content, take ownership of it, or train AI on it. The pop-up required users to agree to these terms to access Adobe apps, disrupting access to creative projects unless immediately accepted.<\/p>
For those unwilling to accept, canceling annual plans could incur fees amounting to 50 percent of their remaining subscription cost. Adobe justifies collecting these fees on the basis that a “yearly subscription comes with a significant discount.”<\/p>
On X (formerly Twitter), YouTuber Sasha Yanshin wrote<\/a> that he canceled his Adobe license “after many years as a customer,” arguing that “no creator in their right mind can accept” the terms which seemed to seize a “worldwide royalty-free license to reproduce, display, distribute” or “do whatever they want with any content” produced using their software.<\/p>
“This is beyond insane,” Yanshin wrote on X. “You pay a huge monthly subscription, and they want to own your content and your entire business as well. Going to have to learn some new tools.”<\/p>
Adobe’s design leader, Scott Belsky, replied<\/a> to Yanshin, stating that Adobe had clarified the update in a blog post<\/a> and noted that Adobe’s terms for licensing content are typical for every cloud content company. However, he acknowledged the terms were written about 11 years ago and that the language could be plainer, writing that “modern terms of service in the current climate of customer concerns should evolve to address modern-day concerns directly.”<\/p>
Yanshin, however, was not reassured by Adobe’s attempts to clarify its terms, stating he gives “precisely zero f*cks about Adobe\u2019s clarifications or blog posts.”<\/p>
“You forced people to sign new Terms,” Yanshin told Belsky on X. “Legally, they are the only thing that matters.”<\/p>
Another user in the thread using an anonymous X account also pushed back, writing<\/a>: “Point to where it says in the terms that you won\u2019t use our content for LLM or AI training? And state unequivocally that you do not have the right to use our work beyond storing it. That would go a long way.”<\/p>
“Stay tuned,” Belsky wrote on X. “Unfortunately, it takes a process to update a TOS,” but “we are working on incorporating these clarifications.”<\/p>
Belsky co-authored a blog post this week announcing that Adobe’s terms would be updated by June 18 after fielding user feedback.<\/p>
“We’ve never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements,” Adobe’s blog stated. “Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update. That said, we agree that evolving our Terms of Use to reflect our commitments to our community is the right thing to do.”<\/p>