There are two main reasons why the AXI EULA ( http://adobe.ly/16U17Xy ) is written as it is;
- Acrobat, as with all the other Adobe desktop software, is licensed to a human being - not to a computer terminal. By running it as a cron / batch process, the software by definition is not being used by a licensee. You can install Acrobat on a virtualisation server (e.g. Citrix) but only so that it can be used by the licensee through their client terminal.
- Adobe's enterprise server-based solution for working with PDF files is LiveCycle, which to put it bluntly is just a little bit more expensive than Acrobat (and some apartments). They are naturally careful to ensure that people cannot reproduce LiveCycle's features using a much cheaper product.
The important clause in this case is 2.1.7.2(e).