Hey Dean, don't get me wrong. It's not the attempt to protect their intellectual property that bothers me, but only the manner in which Waves is going about it.
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?
I don't know what the circumstances of the undercover investigation were. The word undercover does imply that these investigators went into studios posing to be something other than investigators. If they were paying for studio time, or even inquiring about the facilities, equipment, and services under the pretext of contracting services, then they did so under false pretenses. There is such a thing as representing yourself honestly, or misrepresenting yourself and lying about your reasons for contacting the studio.
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?
Perhaps working on the enforcement side would suffice since the law clearly states what uses are legal and what are not. I think Studio24's idea of a "good studio rating" is an option. Or perhaps something even more effective such as an industry funded enforcement agency to police the use of licensed software in affiliation with whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction.
Again, an obvious thought, but how do you do it?
Sorry to state the obvious. I really think that operating under the suspicion that many studios are stealing and to target specific, or even worse, all studios, leaves them open to legal action. All that has to happen is for a legit studio to get pissed off that Waves sent undercover investigators to sniff them out.
The analogy of the drug war refers to a physical commodity and not intellectual property. The solution is obvious, but I guess it hasn't occured to the DEA yet. All they have to do is buy the stuff from the manufacturers no questions asked and destroy it. The manufacturers make their money, the supply dissapears, and it ultimately costs the taxpayers much less than trying to interdict, arrest, try, imprison, rehabilitate, educate, etc. The policy of criminalizing all aspects of the trade prevents the powers that be from effective solutions. I know they would never condone throwing federal money at drug cartels, so instead we throw away billions of dollars to fight a losing battle. And then there are drugs manufactured or grown on home turf that might become the resort of users denied their favorite high.
These issues are complex, but there are other options available to Waves. In fact if they had hired private investigators to check out studios for illegal usage of proprietary software, and the investigators were not working undercover, but identified themselves, I would have little reason to be bothered about it. They would probably not find many wrongdoers this way, but they would discover that many operators are honest and willing to cooperate, and those that don't might find that they are in violation of a EULA if a clause were introduced that stated that such investigations were ongoing.
Paul