A class action lawsuit has been filed by Dave Cooper, a freelance videographer, against Adobe for a bug in its video-editing software Premiere Pro that deleted years of his work within no time. Cooper software watched in horror as his important videos and clips got permanently deleted.
In the lawsuit, Cooper has alleged that the Premiere Pro update contains a flaw in its file management mechanism. Cooper upgraded to Premiere Pro 11.1.0 in April 2017. Due to the presence of this flaw nearly 500 hours of video clips worth around $250,000 were deleted. The software wasn’t allowed access to this data in the first place, claimed Cooper in the lawsuit filed in a California district court.
Adobe has issued an update after acknowledging the bug and urges users of Premiere Pro to update the software as soon as possible. According to Adobe, the clean cache feature of the software had an issue that led to video editing consuming a lot of space on the hard disc drive to create the necessary backups and redundancies in the cache. After the project is completed, users can reclaim the occupied disc space by clearing the cache.
However, Cooper claims that while clearing the cache he lost a lot more than merely redundancies. To his dismay, the Clean Cache command deleted various important documents and data ‘permanently,’ which weren’t even part of the Media Cache folder or its subdirectories.
One of Cooper’s attorneys explained the issue:
“The files that were deleted were both his original video clips as well as files that were a result of his editing. As a freelance visual artist, all you are and all you have is your work. If you don’t have your work then you might as well not be a visual artist.”
According to a rough estimate by Cooper, he has lost over 100,000 digital video clips, the capturing and creation of which cost him approx. $250,000. Moreover, since the deletion, he has lost opportunities to license videos and clips to new clients since the data has been deleted by Premiere Pro. It is worth noting that not only the files that Cooper run via Premiere Pro were deleted but other files that weren’t ever touched by this software were deleted as well. That’s why he is suing Adobe.
The problem of mass deletion was already known to Adobe and Cooper most likely isn’t the only one to have been affected by the bug. After fixing the bug, the company stated in its blog post that:
“With 11.1.1, only files that are within the Media Cache folder’s subdirectories will be deleted. Files that sit next to it will no longer be affected. However, we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media.”
The Premiere Pro version 11.1.0 was released recently and within a month its mass deletion issue has been fixed as well. However, within this one month, many other like Cooper might have had their data deleted. For Cooper, it wasn’t just files but hundreds of thousands of work hours. Cooper tried to settle the matter with Adobe, upon his attorneys’ advice, for an undisclosed amount prior to filing the lawsuit.
However, his offer was declined by Adobe. With the Class Action Lawsuit, Cooper is looking to get compensation for monetary damages including “compensatory, incidental, or consequential damages in an amount that the Court or jury will determine, in accordance with applicable law.”
