Anyone who has tried to cancel an Adobe subscription knows the feeling. Signing up takes thirty seconds. Leaving takes a search for the right menu, a few "are you sure?" screens, and then the discovery of an early termination fee nobody mentioned when you clicked "buy."
That frustration is behind one of the more interesting software stories this year. A developer named Brandon Thomas has released open source alternatives to most of Adobe's lineup: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. He says he built them with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. On Hacker News, he explained why he did it. He'd been hit by Adobe's cancellation fee one too many times.
Louis Rossman, the repair advocate and YouTuber, covered the project in a recent video, and his take was blunt. Even people who dislike AI, he argued, should be able to enjoy watching it happen to Adobe.
The double standard
Rossman's case rests on a contrast in Adobe's own terms of service.
In 2022, Adobe told users its automated systems might analyze their content with machine learning to improve its products. In 2024, it updated its terms to say it could access user content through "automated and manual methods." There was no opt out. Users who didn't accept the new terms were locked out of their own project files until they did. Adobe later clarified that it does not train its generative AI models on customer content, but the forced acceptance left a lot of people angry.
Meanwhile, Section 17 of Adobe's General Terms of Use bans reverse engineering, including watching what goes in and out of an application in order to recreate it. It also bars users from trying to recreate Adobe's products at all.
Adobe can look at your work to improve its software. You can't look at its software to build your own.
That's the part Rossman can't get past.
None of this is new frustration. In June 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice sued Adobe, alleging the company hid an early termination fee from millions of subscribers and made cancelling hard on purpose.
Is it legal?
As the law stands today, Thomas appears to be on solid ground. His project's readme says the work is built from Adobe's public specifications, and its PDF tool only removes restrictions on a protected file when the owner's password is entered. Nothing is being cracked.
There's also a long history of courts protecting this kind of work. In Sega v. Accolade (1992), the Ninth Circuit held that disassembling code can be fair use when it's the only way to get at a program's functional elements. In Lotus v. Borland (1995), the First Circuit ruled that a menu command hierarchy is an uncopyrightable method of operation. And in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 2 in Google v. Oracle that Google's copying of roughly 11,500 lines of Java API code for Android was fair use. The Court never decided whether APIs can be copyrighted. It simply said that even if they can, Google still wins.
Even the DMCA, a law Rossman openly hates, has a carve out. Section 1201(f) allows someone who lawfully uses a program to get around its protections for the sole purpose of making an independently created program work with other programs. Software that opens Adobe files without Adobe is about as clear a case of interoperability as you'll find.
There are limits. In 2005, the Eighth Circuit ruled that the developers of bnetd, a Battle.net server clone, had signed away their right to reverse engineer by agreeing to Blizzard's terms of use. Contracts can still bite.
What Rossman thinks comes next
The more interesting part of the video is the prediction. Rossman expects companies like Adobe to stop fighting individual clones and start lobbying to change the rules. If AI makes it this cheap to rebuild software, the moat gets shallow, and a company can't keep raising prices or burying cancellation fees when a free alternative is a weekend away.
He sketches a few ways that push could go.
- Tighter anti-circumvention law, expanding Section 1201 instead of loosening it.
- Broader software patents. The Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank blocks patents on abstract ideas dressed up with a generic computer. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2025 (S. 1546 and H.R. 3152) would wipe out those court made limits. It was referred to the judiciary committees in May 2025.
- Compulsory licensing, borrowed from music. Under 17 U.S.C. § 115, anyone can record a cover of a song without the songwriter's permission, but they have to pay royalties set by law. Apply that to software and a free clone stops being free. Rossman's example is LibreOffice paying Microsoft every time someone opens a .doc file. It sounds absurd until you remember it's already how music works. And it raises a question nobody has answered yet: if a royalty were owed, who pays it? The person who wrote the prompt, or the AI company?
- International treaties. Rossman points out that the DMCA itself came out of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and he expects the same route to be tried again. WIPO's copyright committee is meeting November 30 to December 4, 2026, where a scoping study on AI training and copyright is scheduled to be presented.
Adobe's history here
Rossman also brings up a moment many people have forgotten. Adobe instigated the federal investigation behind the first criminal case under the DMCA, against the Russian company ElcomSoft and its programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. The FBI arrested Sklyarov at DEF CON in Las Vegas in July 2001. He faced up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine per count. Adobe withdrew its support for the complaint a week later, after public backlash, but the arrest had already happened.
Why it matters beyond Adobe
Rossman's broader point is that most people aren't firmware engineers, and most people are getting squeezed by products that change after purchase. He mentions an exercise bike that stopped working with third party apps after a firmware update, leaving owners stuck with the maker's ad filled app. Someone used Claude to get around that lock. Rossman himself used Claude to replace a bookkeeping integration that went from a one time $200 license to nearly $100 a month, with login bugs on top.
His foundation, the FULU Foundation, has petitioned the Copyright Office in its triennial rulemaking for exemptions covering devices whose makers have dropped support or gone out of business, ads pushed onto devices after sale, and content recognition software on smart TVs. He wants reverse engineering of software added to that conversation.
The argument is simple. AMD exists as an x86 competitor because reverse engineering was allowed. LibreOffice can open your Word files because reverse engineering was allowed. If that door closes now, just as AI makes it accessible to ordinary people, the companies that benefited from it decades ago will be the ones who pulled it shut.
Whether Adobe responds in court, in Congress, or not at all, the cost of building an alternative just dropped sharply. That changes the math for every company that relies on customers having nowhere else to go.