Wagtunes, check out my previous points on the subject. In short, PACE have a monopoly (or near one) in this market. These are the terms of use (as I put it previously, premiums or the cost of doing business) they can impose because they don’t have any (serious) competition. You buy the plugin, you agree to the terms of use. It’s difficult to sue because you have or *should have* known about the terms of use prior to purchase (caveat emptor - buyer beware).wagtunes wrote:I don't understand something. If there's all these problems with iLok, Pace, or whatever it is and neither the VST vendor, iLok or Pace will help you, why don't you just sue them? I'm dead serious. You bought the software. You have a receipt. They refuse to do anything to allow you to access software that you paid for. Seems to me this is grounds for litigation.
Let me tell you. If this happened to me (you all know what a bastard I can be) I'd be on the phone with a lawyer in 5 minutes if everybody said "Sorry, can't help you. You're out $5,000 in software."
Why are we just taking this? Why don't we go on social media and make a big stink about this? Force changes. When good men do nothing, evil prevails.
Do SOMETHING!
We, as users, are a bound to PACE terms through the purchase of the plugin. One of those terms is that it is up to the discretion of the developer to decide whether licenses should be reissued. For example, a computer may die(logic board failure, in my case), or you lose the USB key. The user must contact each developer to request new licences. The developer could refuse to reissue a licence for any reason or no reason at all: licence reissue is at their discretion. In my case, the process was smooth, quick and painless, other then a couple odd ducks.
For a fee, however, you can pay PACE for two - week temporary licenses to continue to work. So they could, if they wanted to, issue temporary licences for free. Instead, they create an additional revenue stream: key replacement and temp. Licencing.
If you wanted to sue, PACE would argue that you lack standing since you could have paid for temporary licences, and that reissuing licences isn’t their job anyway - it’s the developers. You would then have to sue the developers individually. There, you would have to argue that refusal to issue a new licence is unreasonable according to some test. In my experience, there was generally no problem requesting new licences, but I guess there could be scenarios where there could be.
