Tale of two sizes

[Long story but has a point for your start up]

Photoshop. A great product and worth every penny I've paid for it.   Recently, I've gotten really aggressive about getting better at using it. I've been on some amazing trips over the years and have finally started to take this Photo hobby seriously.  I have two Macs. I have an iMac all decked out with the maximum RAM possible, big hard drive, secondary drive, etc.  I also just bought a new MacBook Pro, again, with the larger hard drive and max RAM memory.

When I am on the road or watching TV, etc, I want to practice things like color correction or grabbing layers and putting my dog on a surf board riding the waves in front of the Eiffel Tower.  The point of this practice is to get super good with the tools so on my Iceberg or Sea Lion photos, I can really make them look their best.

I sent a note to Adobe's support group which, after the praise, etc, had this paragraph:

"I want to find out if it is okay to put the Photoshop CS3 I've upgraded to on both my MacBook Pro and my iMac. As I said, I'm not doing anything iMac other than fooling around/practicing, I do all the real work on my desktop machine. Think of it as like solitare on the iMac, just a practice effort."

I got, after a week, a response which, among other things said:

"Photoshop is licensed per copy and as such we expect you to adhere to the terms of the agreement associated with the product."

Nice, eh? Keep in mind I also own a PC copy of Photoshop, own Photoshop Elements (Mac and PC), and could find a bootlegged key on the Internet in about 3 seconds, if that long.  I told them about the other copies, just so you know.  As you can see, not exactly helpful. Email deleted and I'll futz with Elements.

Now, let me point out the case where there is a $75 plug-in which does some really nice touch up.  As a test of sorts, I sent pretty much the same note to this company. Three people, I believe but don't know for sure.

The response after 3 hours:

"Well, the key you activated [] with will activate that same D/L you have on another machine. We weren't that sophisticated about it and while we're okay with you doing it (thank you for the kind words), please keep this private as we are small and don't want people knowing the key thing doesn't phone home, do IP or MAC address stuff, etc. We'd prefer not to get ripped off and our piracy rate is -we think- low. So, go have fun just shhh about it. ;-)"

So, I'm keeping them out of the story and I sent them another $75 just because they were so nice/personable about it.

There is the great start up/small business versus big lumbering bureaucracy lesson in all of this for you.

I'd spell it out but I'm sure you clearly see it.

Comments

[iolaire]

Did you look at the Photoshop license to check? In the past laptop/desktop installation was allowed.

In my older versions of Photoshop 7.0 the license, in the Legal folder and named USEnglish.txt, read like this:
2.4. Portable Computer Use. The primary user of the Computer on which the Software is installed may also make a second copy for his or her exclusive use on a portable Computer provided the Software on the portable Computer is not being used at the same time the Software on the primary computer is being used.

[rick segal]

iolarie,

Read a licensing agreement? Me? :-)

Actually/Seriously, I didn't. For CS3, you could be right. What's more interesting the the email threads. Makes it even better if you are right. I'll take a peek.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.

[Mark]

The CS3 agreement (and copy protection) allows installation on a maximum of two (2) machines, so you can do so. Just don't use both at the same time and be sure to de-authorize should you ever need to move to an upgraded or new machine.