Photoshop maker Adobe sought EU approval last Friday. A
request made a month before the summer holidays suggests the company expects
the EU competition enforcer to open a full-scale investigation following its
initial scrutiny.
The Commission earlier this year warned the deal threatens
to significantly affect competition in the market for interactive product
design and whiteboarding software.
Figma's web-based collaborative platform for designs and
brainstorming is hugely popular among tech firms including Zoom Video
Communications, Airbnb and Coinbase.
Britain's competition watchdog on Friday gave Adobe a week
to offer remedies to address its concerns or face a deeper investigation.
Adobe said in June that it will offer Firefly, its
artificial intelligence tool for generating images, to its large business
customers, with financial indemnity for copyright challenges involving content
made with the tools.
The move to include compensation comes amid a rise in
lawsuits around the image data used in AI services from companies such as
Stability AI and Midjourney that can generate imagery from just a few words of
text.
Adobe, earlier this year, released a test version of
Firefly, its own service which it says was created with legally safe image
data.
Adobe said it will start offering Firefly to its corporate
customers as part of Adobe Express, a tool aimed at helping business users who
do not specialize in design to create images and documents.
In an effort to give those customers confidence, Adobe said
it will offer indemnification for images created with the service, though the
company did not give financial or legal details of how the program will work.
"We financially are standing behind all of the content
that is produced by Firefly for use either internally or externally by our
customers," Ashley Still, senior vice president of digital media at Adobe,
told Reuters.