The American company, software developer Adobe, automatically and free of charge renews licenses for users in Russia. This is reported by the state Russian news agency TASS, citing several sources whose licenses were renewed without payment.
According to an employee of one of the Russian IT companies, licenses that were purchased through the official Adobe online store have the possibility of auto-renewal after linking the card. Customers who cannot use the card to pay for products abroad receive free subscription renewals. The source claims that they can do this "to maintain loyalty and support their users in a difficult period." At the same time, for corporate licenses that are sold through official resellers, auto-renewal is not provided.
An employee of another IT company claims that the automatic renewal function became possible six months ago. You cannot buy a new subscription, you can renew the old subscription only for those products that an individual user already has. This agency interlocutor was able to automatically renew the subscription for 45 days in the spring of 2022, the text says. After this period, the license had to be renewed for a year, and only a foreign bank card could be used for payment.
Earlier, the CEO of the Ninsar.Games gaming studio, Yegor Sechinsky, said that the subscription to the Adobe package “is still active,” although it has not been paid for for a year. What kind of subscription in question is not specified in the agency's material.
The subscription to the Adobe package is extended without payment, since the user may have activated the automatic license renewal function, Anna Sarbukova, legal consultant at EBR, suggested. When a user purchases a license for the first time, after the expiration of its initial validity period, it is automatically renewed for the next period, while the money is automatically debited from the user's card. However, if the client is an individual, it is possible to make a payment only from bank cards issued not in Russia and not in Belarus.
In March 2022, Adobe stopped selling products in Russia due to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In Russia, it is impossible to buy subscriptions for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and other products. Adobe has also blocked access to its cloud storage for Russian state media, TASS claims. In April last year, Adobe allowed the renewal of the licenses of its products for customers in Russia who had previously purchased licenses.
Since February 24, more than 1,000 foreign companies have left Russia, including Microsoft, Netflix, McDonald's, Johnson & Johnson and others. Despite the fact that hundreds of companies have left the Russian market during more than a year of the war in Ukraine, the majority of organizations headquartered in the EU and G7 countries continue to work in Russia, Swiss economists have found out .