Acrobat Activation Agonies

There has to be a better way. Even if you have some sympathy for software publishers wanting to protect themselves from piracy, anyone who has experienced the aggravation that a flawed copy protection scheme can cause knows that the industry’s DRM approach just isn’t working. That’s certainly what one reader has learned from the tortured experience he’s had with Adobe Acrobat activation over the last month.

(To hear this reader and others sound off on the vagaries of Digital Rights Management in general, listen to my “Failed DRM” podcast here.)

“Being a software developer I usually don’t gripe much about the DRM stuff, as it comes with the territory,” the reader wrote me weeks ago. “But here is one for the record books when it comes to stupid IT designs as far as the activation issues I encountered with Adobe. I upgraded from Acrobat 7.0 to 8.0, because the demos and features looked great. After installing it, I didn’t really use it for a few months. Then I went to use it and it said it was not activated.”

When the reader went to the menu, he was puzzled to see both the “Activate’ and “Deactivate’ buttons turned off. “Seems stupid — shouldn’t one always be highlighted?” the reader wondered. “After calling in, Adobe told me to run the repair function. I did, and it worked for one day, and then it was deactivated again and both buttons were off again. I called again and waited on hold forever to be told to uninstall and reinstall. So I uninstalled and it deactivated. I went to reinstall and it said I did not have an original product to upgrade from. Wow, like I’m supposed to keep all hundred-plus key codes I’ve ever had from Adobe. So after about 3 more people and a lot more time on the phone I got around the installation and activated again with a temp key. Then within hours it deactivated again.”

The reader then entered a support nightmare from which he is yet to awaken. For weeks on end, tech after tech would tell him to run the repair function and reinstall. When that wouldn’t work, the techs would begin speculating as to what changes he should make to him computer to placate the activation gods. “Gee, the guy would say, why do you need to mirror your hard drive?” the reader wrote. “Then they send me to another and the guy says, gee, if you upgrade or restore your drive, or change your configuration, or backup to Ghost, or use a RAID array, or use a disk defragger, the activation doesn’t like it. Then they start asking why I need to do these things, which is none of their business.”

Some of the Adobe techs mentioned that what the reader really needed to fix the activation problem was “Patch 2.70.” Unfortunately, it seems Patch 2.70 is not provided to just any old Acrobat customer, and the reader had to supplicate his way up the support ladder to find someone who could authorize sending it to him. “I finally get to the right guy and he asks me why I need it and why I can’t stop mirroring and defragging and using Ghost. Finally he says he’ll escalate the issue and I’ll have an e-mail in 24 hours. Next day there’s no e-mail so I call back. It was never escalated and I have to start the process of filing to get the patch all over again.”

The reader is a stubborn man, though, and he eventually prevailed upon Adobe to send him Patch 2.70. It didn’t help. Several more weeks of escalations to supervisors and higher levels of Adobe support have followed, without success. Last week Adobe promised to send him a copy of Acrobat – presumably the corporate version – that would get around the problem. But at last report it still hasn’t shown, so the reader’s copy of Acrobat 8 remains deactivated.

“The amount of time, support, and money that Adobe and I have wasted on this is crazy,” the reader wrote. “I understand protecting your product, but these people have gone way overboard with this activation that’s tied so closely to the hardware that you can’t do anything that doesn’t upset it. Many people back up, restore, defrag and mirror disks and many more will do so as the prices come down. I think Adobe needs to clean some management house, toss out this stupid activation process, and get something that works instead of the runaround.”

It seems to the reader that a much simpler activation process would be far less prone to failure. “Why not just ping their site once a month to validate the license number and count the installations under that product key? If I exceed my license count, the next month they don’t allow the copy to activate any more. Then if I give my license key away to a friend or post it on the Internet, I’m just hurting myself. But if I change hardware machines I could deactivate it on the old one and reactivate it on the new system.”

I’m not sure how viable the reader’s idea is, but it certainly does make some sense that if the DRM is going to be phoning home periodically anyway, there’s no reason it has to be tied to specific hardware components of your system. Yes, key codes can be stolen, but – as Microsoft as so amply demonstrated with its multiple tiers of activation, Windows Genuine Advantage validation, and now SPP – that’s going to happen regardless of how many levels of copy protection you stack on a product. And as the reader’s experience with Adobe attests, trying to make the activation scheme more sophisticated can just increase the points of failure and the burden on legitimate customers as well as the software publisher’s support staff.

Is there a better way for software publishers to fight piracy than the type of aggravating activation Adobe’s adopted? Surely there must be. Tell us what you think the solution is. Post your comments below, write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com or phone the Gripe Line voice mail at 1 888 875-7916.

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