I thought Waves came dongled. So regular users are forced to use something awfully inconvenient, which adds considerably to the price of the final products [but none to its functionality really] and it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, namely protect the investment. Way to go.

I'm no fan of the dongle, but it does actually provide a very important advantage that, for instance, SONAR doesn't have. And that's that you can install your Waves plugs on multiple machines and just move the dongle around to whichever one you want to work on. That's a real world benefit that a lot of supposedly less tight fisted companies don't allow for.

It's not inconvenient at all really, so I don't have any problem with it on that front. I plugged it in and it's just plugged in and that's all there is to it. I had problems with getting some of their plugs to work, and I had suspicions that the dongle might have been at the root of the problem, but in the end it doesn't look like it was. It was just some wierdness with their installer vs. the security settings on my machine.

The only flat out down side to it is that if SONAR glitches, I can't get a stack dump in the debugger to send to the SONAR folks because the iLok driver will shut down the app if it's connected to by a debugger.

If you believed that your neighbor was coming onto your property at night and doing something but you could never prove it, would you feel like a vigilante for setting up a camera and capturing it and then going to the police with evidence, even if that camera captured the neighbor in his own yard? If you felt that a company was poisoning the creek by your house, but no one would ever doing anything about it, but you cold prove it by taking a tour of their company and getting some pictures, would you feel like you were being a vigilante? I wouldn't, and I don't think most would.

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. The company poisoning the nearby creek is harming public property, not private property. Your analogy doesn't hold because neither Waves' software, nor any recording studio is public property. Doubtless the concept of intellectual property is a tricky subject. The creators view it in terms of ownership, and you appear to sometimes view it as a private possession with territorial rights, and sometimes as a public stream vulnerable to poisoning through theft. If the laws are insufficient and difficult to enforce, perhaps Waves should direct their efforts towards improving legislation and enforcement rather than vigilantism.

No matter if the intent is to protect private property, entrapment is entrapment, and I suspect most courts would toss out any legal action against studios caught using pirated software in this fashion. Waves probably knows this also and that is why they threaten these studios with legal action on the one hand, and with the other hand attempt to extort egregious fees. If I were one of these studios I would not hesitate to sue them and perhaps also to charge them with obstruction of justice.

Even though the end user is at fault, the real criminals are the hackers that crack protected intellectual property and distritbute it in public forums. Aren't these the persons Waves should be persuing, and not their potential customers?

Paul

(edited for a spelling error)

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. As I said above, if you went into a studio and said you wanted to film your session so that you could improve later, do you think that a legimate studio would stop you from doing so? If not, then how is it any different that Waves went in an filmed something?

If the laws are insufficient and difficult to enforce, perhaps Waves should direct their efforts towards improving legislation and enforcement rather than vigilantism.

Well, that's an obvious idea. The problem is that there's no answer. There are already laws on the books, people just ignore them because they can. Can you come up with law that would make the people stealing the stuff stop? There isn't one because they know they won't get caught anyway. There are only really two ways to deal with it. Technical means to try to prevent, and reactive measures like this to try to deal with it after it happens. Law enforcement is pretty much a complete waste of time with this kind of thing for the most part, if the folks involved aren't professional pirates. They aren't going to spend their time busting studios looking for software when there are many times more dangerous stuff to take care of first.

No matter if the intent is to protect private property, entrapment is entrapment, and I suspect most courts would toss out any legal action against studios caught using pirated software in this fashion.

How is that entrapment? Entrapment is when the accuser coerces the person into comitting the crime. The crime was already committed here, and all Waves did is document it. Personally, I think that Waves is doing them a favor by not pressing criminal charges against them. That would probably do more harm to their business and person than just making them pay up plus interest. But either way, the cost of Waves taking them to court would probably be prohibitive, which is another one of the ways that IP owners have no effective rights. When your product is stolen many times over by a small group, the going to court works. When it's stolen by many people in singls units, it's not practical. You'll go broke just trying to go after a tiny fraction of them.

Even though the end user is at fault, the real criminals are the hackers that crack protected intellectual property and distritbute it in public forums. Aren't these the persons Waves should be persuing, and not their potential customers?

Again, an obvious thought, but how do you do it? It's almost impossible. Many of them are overseas, probably a fair number in Russia, where they can't get gotten at. If it was that simple, this wouldn't even be a problem. So, as in the drug war, where the crackers are overseas and the only people on home territory are the buyers, you are often stuck with going after the demand, not the supply.

I dont see the big deal, if you have nothing to hide. Let them come and take a look, posing as customers, who cares. Unless your one of them who has something to hide. I could care less what they do to protect "Their" software. Its not yours, they own the software, they just lease it too you to use anyways. Its kinda like when you lease a house and the owner wants to check it out to make sure your not trashing it. They have every right to do so.
Cj

Well, I think we can all agree that they are lucky that CJay isn't running Waves :-)

You just made me laugh so hard, i farted.
Cj

What seems to be said here is that Waves intend to use fear and suspision as a form of copy protection. Presumably however they intend to use this (somewhat negative) form of copy protection IN ADDITION to the existing (somewhat negative) form of copy protection that they have hitherto used (namely, iLok dongle authoriastion). So they will be relying on TWO (somewhat negative) forms of copy protection. Way to go... not!

If Waves effects are as good as they claim, they should be able to hold their place in the market without the company going to such extreem lengths to try and prove how *exclusive* they are. In fact, if they are good as claimed, they could probably sell vastly more units by lowering the price to make them more accessible to the huge project studio market, and of course scrapping iLok (which is very unpopular and seems to cause a lot of problems, especially on Windows machines, while failing to prevent piracy anyway).

In the meantime I am happy to call their bluff, and stay with Sonitus, Kjaerhus, etc.

as a studio who proudly advertises the fact that we dont use any pirated software, I'm glad someone has finally decided to do something about this.

It REALLY annoys me when I hear of folks running studios on cracks, and you'd be amazed how many do.

Sure it means that maybe I don't have every single plugin on the planet, but at least business is being generated for the ones I do have.

I guess waves are the only company big enough to do this, aside from maybe NI.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

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!!