ORIGINAL: headquest

Hi Dave :)

I hear what you are saying, but surely the whole point of any copy protection mechanism is to protect/increase sales, rather than to pursue self-appointed resposibility for law enforecment?

As such I do think there are more helpful/positive approaches to protecting and increasing sales. Propellerhead have been one of the most successful companies of recent years, and their Reason software avoids all of the nasty copy protection mechanisms altogether. Instead they provide additional content to registered users, the community, etc... and most importantly, they sell their product at a price point that is affordable to the widest market. I think that Cakewalk also follow a similar path, producing high quality product at a competitive price, with excellent support to registered users.

Annoying though piracy is (I completely agree with your point about that), C/R and dongles has signally failed to solve the problem. Companies getting shirty and trying to generate fear and mistrust within the professional music/studio community seems like another harsh and provocative move. I rather hope that less people will use Waves as a result, and I mean their previous paying customers, not just the pirates. As stated before, I would certainly avoid using a product produced by a company that distrusts me and send inspectors round to check up on me!!

ORIGINAL: SvenArne

...a few years in prision (not jail, prision)...

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't wanna go to prision. I hear it's much tougher than jail!

Sven

ORIGINAL: droddey

So the studio where there may or may not be pirated software in use is the property in question? How is that Waves' territory? Only the software they designed and sell is their property, not the studio they contract under false pretenses.

They paid to come into the studio. THere's no such thing as false pretenses. If they want to pay to come into the studio and stand on their head the whole time, that's their business. They paid for it.

ORIGINAL: ...wicked
Some private investigator pretending to be a musician successful enough to need a pro studio, then coming in and asking questions about cracked Waves plugins... all the while asking the engineer to talk into his lapel? Pretty funny.

For god sakes Waves wants $1000.00 for their SSL bundle on their website. At Sweetwater it's $750.00. That's a lot of money either way! Now if they sold that bundle for $400.00 I would have purchased it a long time ago. I'm hoping to get a Dunede for a reasonble price at some point. Hopefully the price will come down or I wil find a good deal on eBay.

I'd like for spies to work on my behalf and infiltrate Waves Co. Their mission: once inside, authorize my specific license to use Native Power Pack which Waves Co have stolen from me and are holding for $200 ransom.

ORIGINAL: droddey

While I agree that they charge too much, you have to put it in perspective. I use Kjaerhus and Voxengo plugs for my core stuff (EQ, compression, limiting), but how many plugs do Kjaerhus and Voxengo have? Why don't they have as many as Waves? Why don't they support ProTools? Well, probably because they can't afford to hire the people required to create a full suite of plugs and maintain them and provide customer service for them and deploy them on multiple (very different) platforms. You can't outfit a whole studio from either of them, but you can from Waves, because they have the resources to hire the programmers to create a full line.

And Kjaerhus and Voxengo are single programmer outfits, AFAIK, and if anything happens to those two guys, everything you've invested in them is a waste because they'll die as products. That's fine for us in a home studio, but it's not for a professional studio. They need to know that the company will remain viable and will continue to expand their offerings. That costs money, and in a fairly low volume business it costs even more money per unit. And the research to create new and powerful new plugs, to gather high quality impulse files, support new platforms, etc... is not cheap. Companies like K and V are able to make a basic living and operate a small company, but they can't expand significantly at those prices as the volumes that these types of products sell at.

ORIGINAL: Editor

Dean - in reply to several of your quotes here...

I agree 100% that Waves is well within their rights to use whatever copy protection or anti-piracy methods they choose within the limits of the law. In fact, Waves is perfectly within their rights to make any number of business blunders and marketing snafus.

Several years ago I broke the story on Waves' absurd anti-piracy paranoia and ridiculous use of bizarre and (IMHO) unethical copy-protection schemes. At that time, Waves software was more virus than application. I'll tell you from personal experience with that company that they were absolutely unable after several months to get me a version of their software that didn't wreck my test machines. This story was more than a single incident: Waves copy protection problems date back at least to 1998.

I think Waves makes great software, but their copy-protection has long been over-the-top, and, IMHO, dangerous for any professional studio to employ. Based on their history, I cannot trust them to produce software that won't completely run my recording rig into the ground. I would never recommend that a professional studio install their software, if only due to the risk that the copy protection will glitch and lock up the computer at a critical time.

I know many people who have great experience with their software and never hit problems with their copy protection. However, in professional circles, the mantra has long been "buy the software, but use the crack" because historically, the cracked Waves software is more reliable than the retail version.

I am relatively sure that Waves spends an inordinate percentage of its annual expenditures on anti-piracy efforts. As a paying customer, I personally frown upon their use of my money that way, because it represents clearly misplaced priorities and, in the end, does not benefit me, their customer, in the least. Curiously, many other competitive companies (ie Cakewalk) are able to thrive with only minimal copy protection.

I for one will continue to scold Waves for their continued misuse of copy protection and other anti-piracy schemes.

Waves doesn't seem to get it, I'm afraid. Just coming off their WUP disaster (driving customers
away in-droves), having to woo them back with re-bundling, WUP caps and 50% NARAS discounts,
they do this?

It's a public-relations nightmare and perpetuates the stereotype of them being
ham-handed greedy bastards. You gotta wonder who in the company comes up with these
half-assed ideas?

According to my Waves rep, they're using the same paceApp toolkit as the other iLok enabled companies do ( McDSP, Digi, Sonnox, Celemony, etc.). Is this not the case? I have found since they retired their hard disk authorization scheme, that I haven't had any problems with the stability of their plugs or their impact on my DAW. I've never run a crack, so I couldn't tell you if they are any more stable . . but I don't believe copy protection has been at the root of any of my (quite infrequent) crashes (to date). Also, I believe Pace has made good progress in correcting some of the more intrusive aspects of the interLok drivers.