Anti-counterfeiting provisions in the latest version of Adobe Systems' flagship product have proven little more than a speed bump, but company representatives insist that including them was the right thing to do.
Adobe acknowledged last week that its Photoshop CS digital editing package includes a "counterfeit deterrence system" designed to prevent users from accessing images of currency.
When the counterfeit deterrence system detects an attempt to access a currency image, it aborts the operation, displays a warning message and directs the user to a website with information on international counterfeiting laws.
Almost as soon as word of Photoshop's new anti-counterfeiting provisions started to circulate, users began finding ways around the system.
Digital artist Kiera Wooley circumvented the restrictions simply by cutting and pasting a bank-note image from another graphics utility into Photoshop.
Advertising agency creative director Ann Shelbourne found she could save a bank-note image in an earlier version of Photoshop and open it without trouble in Photoshop CS.
Other Photoshop CS users said they had successfully imported bank-note images by invoking Photoshop from another Adobe product or by scanning an image in pieces and reassembling it in Photoshop.
The ease with which people seemed to be eluding the anti-counterfeiting software left some wondering why Adobe had included it in the first place.
With digital counterfeiting on the rise worldwide, partly due to software like Photoshop, Adobe voluntarily chose to work with international banks to help solve the problem, said Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for professional digital imaging.
"As a market leader and a good corporate citizen, this just seems like the right thing to do," he said.
Connor said that Adobe was just one of a number of companies that had incorporated the same anti-counterfeiting software into their products. Users of Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro 8 have reported that it, too, blocks images of currency, but Jasc representatives did not return calls for comment.
Over the past several years, high-quality color printers and photocopiers have made counterfeiting significantly easier and cheaper. Between 1995 and 2002, the proportion of counterfeit bills that were digitally created grew from 1 percent to 40 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Central banks are pushing for counterfeit protections in software as well as hardware. The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organization established by the governors of the G-10 central banks to promote the use of anti-counterfeit devices in the computer industry.
Connor said that Adobe has been working with the central banks for several years, but that earlier generations of anti-counterfeit technology caused too many performance problems. The latest version of the software, he said, had solved those problems.
The inner workings of the counterfeit deterrence system are so secret that not even Adobe is privy to them. The Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group provides the software as a black box without revealing its precise inner workings, Connor said.
"From Adobe's standpoint, all we're concerned about really is that it doesn't have a performance impact on customers, that it's stable and doesn't cause crashes and that it's not going to produce false positives -- that it's going to tell someone that a picture of someone's grandmother is a $20 bill," Connor said.
Connor admitted that there were ways to work around Photoshop's anti-counterfeit protections, and said there probably always would be.
"At this point it's probably not bulletproof protection," he said. "This is not something that is ever going to be an ironclad thing that prevents all usage. If we tried to make it ironclad, that's where we really would start disrupting people's work flows."
Adobe representatives acknowledged that the restrictions would inconvenience users who needed to work with images of currency and said that such users would need to contact the appropriate central bank to obtain images permissible under the laws of its country.
In that respect, Adobe is actually exceeding the requirements of U.S. law, which allows color reproductions of U.S. bank notes so long as the reproductions are smaller than 75 percent or larger than 150 percent of actual size. The reproduction must be one-sided, and all materials, including graphic files that were used to make the reproduction, must be destroyed afterward.
Obtaining digital images from the U.S. government is a considerable chore. Adobe recommends that graphic designers who want to work with U.S. currency visit the website of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing to obtain government-approved images. But while the site does provide a scattering of images of U.S. bank notes, they are low resolution and bear prominent red "SPECIMEN" labels, which reduce their usefulness even further.
Graphics professionals who need higher-resolution images or images without the word "specimen" printed across them need to request them in writing from the director of the bureau, said a bureau public affairs specialist.
The bureau usually answers requests in two weeks, she said.
Copy No-No: Adobe and Uncle Sam
