Adobe Takes Down Two-Year Old Reddit Guide for Pirating Adobe CC
- Adobe took down a piracy guide for its Adobe CC app suite last week, which led to Redditors questioning the company’s decision.
- The ‘Pirating Adobe CC for Dummies’ guide was posted back in 2016 and attracted thousands of readers.
- The guide was removed after an official takedown notice was filed by Adobe.
Guides for just about anything are available on the Internet but some of them delve into grey areas like piracy. Naturally, this attracts the attention of copyright holders and legal authorities. Now, Adobe filed a copyright claim on a two-year-old guide that was available on Reddit. The Reddit guide helped users pirate Adobe CC.
The move by Adobe led to a lot of discussion on Reddit and other platforms. While the guide by itself was definitely guilty of helping users learn how to crack software and access it for free, the legality of the takedown was brought into question. Internet users pointed out that the guide by itself did not link users to any tools that enabled piracy and neither did it promote piracy in any way.
Lawyers were approached by TorrentFreak to discuss the legality of the takedown, and it was revealed that the tutorial by itself is definitely illegal and falls under “contributory infringement.” The creator of the tutorial can be held liable for copyright infringement even though he or she may not have pirated the software.
The Reddit moderators who took down the guide did not reveal if Adobe officially filed the complaint themselves or if a representing anti-piracy outfit, similar to Software Alliance, was behind the takedown. However, the author of the guide does have the legal right to challenge the company’s claims of the guide being copyright infringing. It is unlikely that the creator of the guide will file a legal claim against Adobe as it is more than likely he or she wants to remain anonymous. The software company also has the law and finances on its side.
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