Adobe Wants a Tweet Removed for Sharing Link to 27 Year-old Software

Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen is a Finnish specialist in computer security. He writes for several industry magazines, gives interviews, and is also a member of several international organizations dealing with online threats. In addition, he publishes posts on his Twitter account. In one of them he shared a link to Acrobat Reader for old MS-DOS five years ago, namely the original version of the application, released in 1993.

In 2016, the post did not receive any negative reactions. However, it was recently shared again via an automated account that publishes Hyppönen's posts from five years ago. This time, the post was removed on charges of copyright infringement. The automated account was also blocked. However, the entry on the author's main account is still not hidden. The case did not end there, as Hyppönen also received a notice of copyright infringement, a so-called DMCA. It was sent by Incopro, a company that handles anti-piracy activities on behalf of Adobe.

The steps taken would not be surprising if it was a link to pirated sources of some relatively modern software. However, Hyppönen provided a link to a program from over 27 years ago that was designed for MS-DOS. Interestingly, the DMCA lists the designated post alongside tweets from several other users that did in fact link to pirated sources of new Adobe software, including Adobe Spark Post: Graphic Design & Story Templates, the latest update for which was released just a week ago. Hyppönen's post, however, did not link to new applications at any point. So it is possible that this is a hasty and inaccurate response from the company. Hyppönen has already commented on the matter.

So it looks like this situation is not going to just go away. We can only wait to see if Adobe recognizes that they made a mistake or if they go to war with Hyppönen.

• Adobe - official homepage
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