You're harping on a completely different subject from what I was talking about, and while I also have a strong opinion on it, you're attempting to muddle the two into one general ball of "ownership is the only option" without looking at the details of each one.
Alas, I directly answered your question in my last paragraph, by telling you how to figure out how to distribute exotic-bit-combination "generation costs":
> You accept that any information can be freely propagated, and that is just a new rule of the game, and you move on... Things about this model aren't ideal, but it's just how it is going to be.
In Adobe's case, they can strongarm prominent obviously-using businesses with some reduced notion of commercial copyright (as every software vendor has basically been doing for the past decade), set up support contracts that give access to prerelease features (currently works well for smaller, more expensive niches), or (as they're starting to do) further lock down their software by moving to a server-side model and buy time until a Free competitor gets good enough to overrule their inconvenience. If they were just starting off, asking for donations would also work, but clearly at this point they have way too much overhead for that.
Also note that if their product is deprecated by something else, then under the current regime it is considered appropriate that their costs are never recovered. Conversely, at some point their costs have been completely recovered yet they keep right on seeking rent.
Alas, I directly answered your question in my last paragraph, by telling you how to figure out how to distribute exotic-bit-combination "generation costs":
> You accept that any information can be freely propagated, and that is just a new rule of the game, and you move on... Things about this model aren't ideal, but it's just how it is going to be.
In Adobe's case, they can strongarm prominent obviously-using businesses with some reduced notion of commercial copyright (as every software vendor has basically been doing for the past decade), set up support contracts that give access to prerelease features (currently works well for smaller, more expensive niches), or (as they're starting to do) further lock down their software by moving to a server-side model and buy time until a Free competitor gets good enough to overrule their inconvenience. If they were just starting off, asking for donations would also work, but clearly at this point they have way too much overhead for that.
Also note that if their product is deprecated by something else, then under the current regime it is considered appropriate that their costs are never recovered. Conversely, at some point their costs have been completely recovered yet they keep right on seeking rent.