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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Adobe hired some executives from the cable TV or satellite TV industry, where the fine print on some packages locks you into 24 or 36 month contract terms. They know exactly how to do it with the minimum legal amount of notice to the customer when signing up, and how to write the terms of service for acceptance to make it ironclad. Same with 2-3 year terms on cellular carriers with a "free $0!" new samsung phone.

For a long time the local telephone company in British Columbia (Telus) was giving away "free" xboxes or 46 inch flat screen TVs if you locked yourself into a triple play service contract. Of course the buy-out price to end the contract early far exceeded the value of the product given out.

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Australia brought in some consumer law business that didn't have costs or you don't use, could not lock you in.

So for example a phone on a plan is fine as there's a capital good but a gym isn't.

Not as good in the U.K. but we do have some protections. A company can lock you into a contract however at the end of the contract it must default to a rolling 30 days term and the consumer must explicitly renew for a lengthy contract again if you want it. So even if you forget to cancel, you won't get renewed for X amount of years again.

There's two possible outcomes for this.

1. adobe waives the cancellation fee for australian customers

2. adobe eliminates the discounted annual plan for australian customers

> Same with 2-3 year terms on cellular carriers with a "free $0!" new samsung phone.

I really like the moves T-Mobile has done to change this. They very transparent that you are financing the phone on your monthly bill and then receiving monthly credit to off set the monthly payment.

What's wrong with that? If they are giving you 500+$ worth of stuff for you to sign on to a contract, I'm sure they are going to protect themselves from people just signing on to get free stuff and immediately canceling.

If you sign a 2-3 year contract and want to break it before it ends, there will always be some kind of penalty.

Microsoft does this out of all companies. It's not like something limited to "TV or cable", just practically everything.

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