LondonSquirrel

So what about any photo editing app which opens a copyrighted photo? If the copyright information is embedded in the photo, why am I allowed to open it at all?

What happens in an Adobe app if a I paste in a copyrighted photograph, the copyright information being in IPTC fields which Adobe can read, and I then export it? Isn't Adobe now aiding and abetting copyright infringement if we use your reasoning?

I had an Adana when I was 12. I felt like I was king of the world when I started printing things. An early mistake of mine which I still remember: setting the word 'services' as 'sevices'. It taught me a hard lesson after I had printed about 200 of these...

An EULA is a contract. This is different to copyright, which is covered by imposed laws. If you are not party to a contract you are not obliged to obey any part of it. Think about it: your neighbour buys a computer and clicks the 'I agree' button. What affect does that have on you? None whatsoever.

That is very debatable to say the least. As in the examples I have given, in a corporate environment I have no idea if the software is licensed or not, nor what that license is, or if somebody gives me a computer already set up for use. They may well have broken the EULA as they presumably clicked the 'I agree' button, but I did not.

In Europe (and the UK still), EULAs are basically considered part of a contract. If you have not agreed to that contract then you are not a party to it. If somebody gives me a laptop already set up, and I have no EULA is presented to me when I use it, I am not the one who clicked the 'I agree' button, and I am not a party to the other person's contract. It could be the person who clicked the 'I agree' button is in breach of the EULA, but I am not as I was never a party to it. But once again, don't confuse EULAs with copyright. The copyright still exists.

You can say the same about Apple for having tools which copy files.

Do not confuse copyright with EULAs. They are completely different things. An EULA my or may not include permission to copy. E.g. SIL fonts (https://software.sil.org/scheherazade/). Snippet: 'This font software is free to use, modify and redistribute according to the terms of the SIL Open Font License.'

That's not true.

A good point. If you haven't read the EULA then you have no idea what it states.

And the same people had actually completely read the EULAs themselves? Highly unlikely. I have never met anyone who has actually fully read even a single EULA.

Isn't that the point of EULAs? If I have not agreed to that EULA then I am not bound by it.

It would be far easier to state: do not use cloud fonts.

Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Here's your computer, start typing... Nobody in that situation ever asked me to agree to a EULA.

... that I have ever read.

Agreed. I have no idea what the terms are if you create a PDF using a rented font, then end your subscription, now pass the PDF to somebody else with the font embedded. Perhaps that is included in the licence. This is just about companies (in this case Adobe) keeping its hooks in its users. Remember the not-yet resolved story of the Pantone swatches being removed from CC? I think that Pantone thinks it invented the whole concept of colour. In this case of the Adobe cloud fonts, we're talking about a subset of Affinity users - those with Affinity and with CC. I wonder what the percentage of Affinity users that is.

Anyone could do that anyway. Which is why I am saying again that some people are getting on their high horses about it. Exactly my point. It's just another way of doing it, so why are you complaining about this instead of the far easier method of just copying the files using any other tool?

And if you had been at Apple or Microsoft or wherever, you could have disabled all file copying. Because the ability to copy is what you are talking about here.

You are beginning to sound like those warnings that could not be skipped at the start of DVDs. DO NOT COPY THIS DVD. OK, we've heard you.

Nothing at all like Aaron Swartz. I can see you are trying to conflate this into something it is not.

Can you please get off your high horse about this? We're talking about copying files, whether right or wrong. It's absolutely no different to using cp in a terminal.

How do you force disable an app? Unless there is some sort of built in timer requiring a call home to Serif? Isn't that just like an Adobe thing to do? Ring home or be disabled? I don't agree with this at all.

I could write code to access a supposedly hidden/obfuscated directory in a couple of minutes.

I disagree with that argument. A path is just a path. The fact that it might be 'hidden' is neither here nor there. The paths to all kinds of things can be considered 'hidden', but merely accessing them is not a problem in itself. The other side of that coin is that an app can install files in a place which it knows about but which I cannot find. To me, as a user, and having dealt with security issues over the years, is 100% unacceptable. I should know about every single file which an app is installing on my system. As mentioned, I've dealt with this sort of thing from a security aspect - files with unprintable characters in names, files with the 'hidden' flag set on *BSD UNIX (this flag is available in macOS too - man 1 chflags), and other methods to attempt to hide files which should not be there (e.g. creating files, opening a file handle to it, then deleting the file), and so on. These are all old tricks amongst many others. The point is, if a file is trying to be hidden, it makes me look for it even more.

I'm not sure that I would get the blame in that case. There is usually the concept of mens rea. If I don't know about something I can't possibly be guilty of having an intent attached to it. That is not the same thing 'ignorance is no defence'.