Who holds the liability for a Creative Cloud failure?
PeteGould May 14, 2013 3:46 PMI work in video production and work on tight deadlines with a lot of responsibility. Let's imagine a typical scenario.
There's a project that has been shot in multiple locations on an overall budget of, say, $75,000. It is to be presented at a huge live event on a Friday morning. It is now Thursday night - the night before the live event. There has been a last minute change because one of the employees prominently featured in the project was just arrested for a crime and has been fired. It is therefore essential that their appearance be deleted and a substitute inserted in their place; the piece cannot be screened if they are in it. (This hypothetical is based on an actual prior experience of ours on a real project for a real client).
So here we are. Thursday night. Project screening LIVE tomorrow morning. And for some unknown reason, Creative Cloud - fully paid up - decides that we are not an authorized site and refuses to run. Neither copy on neither machine (because the problem is not a local software problem, it is an authorization problem on the Adobe server). For sake of argument, presume that we are absolutely in the right: we are fully paid up.
If we fail to deliver the project on time for the company's live event, the entire purpose for which it was produced is gone. Not only will the company not pay us for the postproduction, they may very well sue us to recover the production costs, since the failure to deliver is at our end due to our software failing to operate.
My question is: who holds this liability? From what I read in the Creative Cloud agreement, it is 100% us. Adobe, despite having caused the problem, cannot be added as an additional defendant and none of the liability can be transferred to them. This despite the fact that if we were still a CS user, even if CS somehow failed on one machine we could use it on the other and finish the project. But by moving to CC, Adobe has subjected us to a single point of failure: the authorization server that decides if we're a legitimate site or not. None of this matters. It is we, not Adobe, who will potentially be sued by the client for the field production costs.
True or false?
And if true: do you believe this is a fair, reasonable and equitable outcome? If so, why?





