Maryland man without backup sues Adobe over Premiere Pro file-eating bug

Adobe Premiere Pro splash screen

A professional photographer and long-time Premiere Pro user claims that after an update the software deleted files including non-Adobe ones. He doesn't want your sympathy, but he does want a $5 million class action lawsuit and trial by jury to blame Adobe for the problem, rather than pointing the finger at not having a reliable backup.

Professional photographer David Keith Cooper of Maryland, US, has filed a claim to take Adobe to jury trial over loss of his data through a software fault in the video-editing app Premiere Pro. He alleges that this should be a class action suit to a value in excess of five million bucks because he knows many other people who've had the same problem.

Adobe Premiere Pro is a subscription application that you pay from $19.99 per month for. An 8TB backup drive costs about $149. We're unclear how much Cooper's lawyers are charging him, but it is probably a great deal more than $19.99 per month, plus $149. You can read practically every other detail online in the filed court document that we've helpfully embedded below.

What Cooper claims happened is that he shot a lot of video. Truly, a lot — he alleges that it was around 500 hours of digital footage that he filmed between 2010 and this terrible day in 2017.

He kept his footage on one external drive connected to his computer and on or about May 1, 2017, he installed the then latest update to Premiere Pro and edited some video. To save space on his computer's internal drive, he moved Premiere Pro's temporary Media Cache to the external to save space. He then clicked on Premiere's Clean Cache command.

He says that instead of this wiping temporary Premiere files, it permanently erased any number of video files and documents from that disk.

Nobody should lose data

According to Adobe's own blog, this bug is true. It was possible back in May 2017 that clearing the cache could wipe non-Premiere files so it is also possible that this how Cooper lost so much work.

Detail from David Keith Cooper's legal filing

We've all lost data and we have all sworn at software that's erased it for us — we're looking at you, Microsoft Word — so we do all recognize Cooper's pain. Only, zoom back to the description of him: he's a professional photographer. The legal filing actually says he's "an experienced and sought-after commercial photographer, videographer, and video editor."

The trouble is, if we or you or anyone else searches for him, the easiest thing you can find that is definitely him is this lawsuit. He's just an experienced photographer who in seven years apparently never made any reliable backups. Perhaps he didn't know how: let us help him out there.

He says he's lost his data because of Adobe but if he shot it on assignment, he's actually lost his client's data. If you're a client seeking after a photographer, we feel we can be sure this one will backup files in the future. And if he wins his case, he'll be able to buy around 30,000 8TB drives to store it on — assuming the lawyers don't take most of it.

And, in case you were wondering, the terms of using the Adobe software are pretty clear about the company not being responsible for data loss for any reason.

Cooper Versus Adobe by Mike Wuerthele on Scribd

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61 Comments

ecarlseen

said about 5 years ago

Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.

Mike Wuerthele

said about 5 years ago

ecarlseen said:

Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.

All the more reason why you should have a good backup. Adobe had a part in this, for sure, but not a $5M part, as data security has always been, and should always be, the user's sole provenance.

MplsP

said about 5 years ago

It's baffling to me why he didn't have a backup, but it well may have been that his backup server was full and he needed to get another hard drive, or he thought he had it set up and found out it wasn't backing up the way he thought. I can think of plenty of scenarios aside from him just being sloppy.

To me this is something akin to Ford having a steering defect and someone getting injured in a crash because they weren't wearing a seatbelt. Should they have their seatbelt on? Definitely, but the steering defect still caused the crash.

bloggerblog

said about 5 years ago

"...rather than pointing the finger at not having a reliable backup." <- Utter crap.
Deleting your personal files then saying 'well, you should've had a backup' is irresponsible, especially from a trusted company like Adobe. I fully support his effort and I hope he wins the five million.

Rayz2016

said about 5 years ago

Mmmm.

Okay, I'm going to side with Mr NoBackup on this one.

Yes, he should have had a backup, but let's look at what happened here.

Adobe erased files that had nothing to do with their application!

What sort of poor software craftsmanship is that?? They are the worst of the worst.

Unfortunately, like every other software vendor, there is a clause in the license that says Adobe does not guarantee the software will work or is fit for purpose.