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!!

it does occur to me that the police should really be the people doing this.

I know a guy who used (don't know if he still does) to run a film production company which ran solely on cracked adobe software.

I would find it a hard pill to swallow earning £600 ($1200) a day using stolen software.

Some people just don't see the problem though.

Sure you have to hire the outfit to do the evidence gathering, but what company would want to annoy the courts further by actually charging for the time the authorities were there? - I know I wouldn't ;)

Kind regards

Dave Rich

the warez scene is currently beaten by waves anyway - the v-series plugins have not been released yet because the one group who can crack them refuses to do so.

I don't see a problem with it either. I run Waves, and I love their product (I don't mind the dongle, the WUP is, well, as said before, but at least their making it better). "You gotta do what you gotta do" sometimes, and this sounds like a plan to me. Plus, this lets the offending studio come off cheaper anyway. Pay the cost of the product you are using, plus a fine. What is the alt, them being sued ? Well, in the end that will cost WAY, WAY more. Also, I don't know how it works with stealing software over the internet, but software like Waves bundles, can run into the thousands of dollars range, which in any normal case would be a felony, and get you a few years in prision (not jail, prision), plus the joy of a felony record. I think the way they are doing it, is a really good "we'll give you a second chance" type thing, which is alot better than the alt.

...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: 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

I guess in other countries prision and jail means the same thing. In the U.S. its totally different. Jail, is where you go if you steal a candy bar, or get cought walking up and down the street drunk. Jail is ran by the city / county. Prision, is ran by the state, and is where murders, rapists, pedophiles, and other people you don't want to be around go.

Yeah, I know. But even though English isn't my 1st language I'm pretty sure it's spelled PRISON, with only one I. I'm just being a prick here...

Sven

Oh. Well, please excuse my memfis edukation.

ORIGINAL: droddey
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.

You can install Sonar on multiple machines. According to the license, you can do so as long as you are the only one using it. It's essentially the same thing as Waves/iLok except Cakewalk is trusting you. And you don't have to install software that has a long history of problems.

That's a big reason I use Sonar: They trust me. So I trust them back. I hope it continues.

This is a problem that won't ever go away. I really don't feel like these companies even target personal users. However, don't mess around if you are a business. The old company I worked for got a fine around $200 K for some mis-used Autodesk licenses. A AutoCad license is just as expensive as Waves. They have the right to gather thier assests and the funds that they created.
With torrent sites on every corner, they really can't stop it all. If they are really lucky, make a small dent in it.

I still think what Microsoft did could work. Their new Flight sim game, (I don't play games, I just read about this), was being leaked, cracked, whatever you call it, and put on these torrent sites. Well, MS, I don't remember, either started to DL it themself, or leaked it themself, but either way, they started to resolve all IP's connected to said torrent, and calling ISP's of the people who were downloading. In other words, they'd call say, Comcast, and say, IP 127.0.0.1 (example) at 9:26pm standard time, 3/25/07, was illegaly downloading cracked versions of our software. The ISP in turn was calling the homes of these people, and telling them that their activity was being monitored, and that they will not tolerate illegal activity, and gave them a "we'll stop your service" warning.

Now, of course you could use proxies, but the type of proxies for the protocall used in p2p file sharing, is hard to find. Well, annoy ones are hard to find. I'm sure people use stuff to leach out socks proxies, and test at bulk with say, access driver or something, but how many people really know how to do all that ? So, in doing this, you'd be finding people at the source, the torrent itself. Seems like a pretty effictive way to go about it to me.