Adobe’s Stupid Licensing System

I bought a copy of CS4 Web Premium for my son, who’s going off to school next month to study web design. It’s a good deal – something I wouldn’t have bought if there wasn’t a student price. We applied online for a serial number (it doesn’t come in the box), and we got it back today, after two weeks. But what happened? The serial number didn’t work. I called Adobe support, and it turns out that because we live in France and requested the serial number in France, it’s for French versions of the software only. But since he prefers using English (he’s bilingual), and he had installed the software, in demo mode, in English, it wouldn’t work. Now he has to reinstall the software in French to be able to use it.

This is a bit annoying for several reasons: he prefers using software in English, and if he buys any books about Photoshop or Dreamweaver, or reads tutorials or articles on the web, the menus and commands in them will be in English and it can be a headache to find the equivalents in French. But beyond that, what right do they have to force him to use one language rather than another? Just because we’re in France, do they think that they have the right to limit the language that’s used for the programs? It’s not like they’ve sold the programs with just one language available; a number of options are possible when installing.

On top of that, it’s not even possible to enter the serial number with a French keyboard layout during the initial installation. As this Adobe knowledge base document points out, you have to change the keyboard layout to be able to do so. Stupid or what?

Adobe’s stupidity is compounded by the obnoxious attitude of the person who handled my call. Rather than propose a solution, he went on about how we got such a good deal, we should be happy with it. I ended the conversation by saying that we should have done like most of the other students here: just stolen the software.

Yet another example of how copy protection limits users’ rights…

Update: I got an e-mail from someone from Adobe offering to set things right. I’ll follow up if this all works out. But it shouldn’t take an angry blog post to get a solution; the people on the phone should have been able to resolve this to our satisfaction. Or the problem should never have existed – I’m still waiting to hear what justification there is for having serial numbers be language-specific.

Update # 2: Adobe got me a new serial number very quickly, and I thank the representative of the company who got this done for me. But I also wonder about all the other people who, as a commenter says, don’t have blogs to put pressure on companies.