Adobe bans accounts of all Venezuelan users in compliance with the US sanctions

2 min read

The U.S. based software company Adobe Inc. announced yesterday that will be canceling all subscriptions and deactivating all accounts for Venezuelan users. This move from Adobe is to become compliant to U.S. Government’s Executive Order 13884 issued on August 5, 2019.

In the support document released yesterday, Adobe explains their decision and informs Venezuelans that they have until October 28 to download any files stored in their Adobe accounts, following which their accounts will be deactivated.

This Adobe ban will impact users of both free or paid Adobe services. The users will not be able to pay for new services, nor will they get any refunds as cited in Executive Order 13884.

President Trump’s new executive order, backed by the US Department of Treasury, bans US companies from having any business relations with Venezuelan entities, private companies, government organizations, non-profits, or individual citizens.

According to PCMag, “Trump administration issued the sanction order against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for allegedly usurping the presidency and perpetrating human rights abuses against the country’s citizens.”

“Under Executive Order 13884, U.S. companies are severely restricted in the business it carries out within Venezuela. As a result, we are ceasing all activity with entities and individuals in Venezuela as well as those who otherwise meet the criteria of Executive Order 13884 or other U.S. sanctions regulations,” the support document mentions. “We apologize for the inconvenience,” adds Adobe.

The U.S. has also imposed similar bans on other countries including Iran, North Korea, and Syria. “Not all US companies follow these bans, but the bigger tech giants do follow US Treasury sanctions to the letter of the law,” ZDNet reports.

This ban has sparked a lot of complaints from Adobe customers in Venezuela.

A user on Hacker News commented, “What makes this even worse is that this is only a huge issue because Adobe moved to the whole ‘Creative Cloud’ thing rather than the old ‘buy each product outright’ model. With the old model, it wouldn’t hurt these creators all that much if their accounts got deactivated since the software would just not get updates. Now on the other hand… they’re screwed. It’s a ‘brilliant’ example of how these ‘cloud’ based services are a bad deal for the user because it puts them at the risk of getting locked out their own purchases due to legal hassles like this.”

Similar to Adobe, in July, Microsoft started enforcing the US Treasury ban/sanctions list on GitHub, a service it bought last year.