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Adobe Goes After 27-Year Old 'Pirated' Copy of Acrobat Reader 1.0 for MS-DOS * TorrentFreak:
Today, there are many popular PDF readers available but Adobe’s original ‘Acrobat Reader’ is still the go-to software for many. Needless to say, Adobe doesn’t want third-parties to pirate its software, so the company regularly sends out DMCA notices to remove infringing copies.
[...] While this is totally understandable when it comes to newer releases, F-Secure researcher Mikko Hyppönen found out that Adobe’s takedown efforts go far beyond that.
In a recent tweet, Hyppönen mentioned that the software company removed one of his tweets that linked to an old copy of Acrobat Reader for MS-DOS. This software, hosted on WinWorld, came out more than 27-years ago, shortly after the PDF was invented.
The security researcher posted the tweet five years ago and at the time there were no issues. The message was copied a few weeks ago by his own Twitter bot, which reposts all his original tweets five years later.
“They sent a DMCA notice to my bot (@mikko__2016) when it posted that tweet on the tweet’s 5th anniversary. The original tweet is fine,” Hyppönen notes.
While the original tweet is still up, the reposted message was swiftly removed by Twitter. Not just that, the bot’s account was locked as well, which is standard practice nowadays.
Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the “brand protection analyst” at Incopro, which is one of Adobe’s anti-piracy partners. It doesn’t provide any further details on the reasons for taking it down, other than an alleged copyright infringement.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday March 17 2021, @10:35AM (5 children)
PDF was subtly different, because the docs were incomplete and seemingly random bits would resist analysis as eps.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 17 2021, @10:21PM (4 children)
PS and EPS were great, if you were using them for their intended purpose, which was to supply a non-editable file* to someone who would print it, safe in the knowledge that the file would render correctly on the device he was printing it to.
Usually the file would be 4-colour separated documents printed onto film from which a printing plate would be made.
PDF was Adobe's attempt to supplant PS and EPS with a file type that could be "soft-proofed" by the customer (which was stupid and didn't work) and then output to whatever device.
Letting the rest of the world use PDFs came pretty soon after when Adobe thought they had invented a gold mine and could get the whole world buying copies of Acrobat. That did not quite work out for them, although they have made a lot of money.
* Not really non-editable.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday March 17 2021, @10:27PM (3 children)
Yeah, not exactly the easiest thing to edit, but it certainly could be done.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 17 2021, @11:21PM (2 children)
Didn't Quark Xpress edit EPS files? My memory is a bit hazy, but I think that's right.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday March 17 2021, @11:33PM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 18 2021, @12:33AM
I worked in the pre-press industry and didn't know what a "text editor" was at the time.