Another FM video with cracked Sylenth. ...and Martin Garrix.

[chaosWyrM]

ah i think we misunderstood each other. yes i can see how you can prove it HAS worked...but if it doesnt work you cant prove anything. im certainly not saying that the cp never works...obviously it does...sometimes.

Fair enough, I can agree with that.

It works often enough for me to not be depressed when a crack comes out. I think working cracks hurt my state of mind more than my wallet. Non-working cracks however seem to be good enough to finance an employee. Or our advertisement. Or both.

this is the point that i start to have a philosophical problem with your approach. now...its your software and your company and you have every right to run it however you choose. but to me this comes across not much better than the pirates.

you deliberately and with forethought, purposely seed bad versions to effectively blackmail people into a purchase. you could simply make it not work, in a more reasonable time frame, but you dont. you make it wait far longer than it needs to so that people incorporate it and losing it is worse than buying it.

you purposely benefit from piracy, and in fact encourage it so that you can.

if pirates shouldnt benefit from piracy...why should you?

[aciddose]

I don't think Urs is the sort who would argue people should not benefit from something simply because they haven't paid for it.

Software is not stolen, it can't be. To steal requires that you deprive someone of something that was in their possession by removing it and placing it elsewhere. A sale had never taken place, therefore sales can not be "stolen".

So when you ask this question you've set up a straw-man. The real question is why not? Why shouldn't he? It does not harm his paying customers and he is fully within his rights to give those who refuse to support him for his work a swift kick in the ass.

[Urs]

ah i think we misunderstood each other. yes i can see how you can prove it HAS worked...but if it doesnt work you cant prove anything. im certainly not saying that the cp never works...obviously it does...sometimes.

Fair enough, I can agree with that.

It works often enough for me to not be depressed when a crack comes out. I think working cracks hurt my state of mind more than my wallet. Non-working cracks however seem to be good enough to finance an employee. Or our advertisement. Or both.

this is the point that i start to have a philosophical problem with your approach. now...its your software and your company and you have every right to run it however you choose. but to me this comes across not much better than the pirates.

you deliberately and with forethought, purposely seed bad versions to effectively blackmail people into a purchase. you could simply make it not work, in a more reasonable time frame, but you dont. you make it wait far longer than it needs to so that people incorporate it and losing it is worse than buying it.

you purposely benefit from piracy, and in fact encourage it so that you can.

if pirates shouldnt benefit from piracy...why should you?

That's not entirely true.

First off, it's an established known fact that our software has strong protection. The crackers even acknowledge that in their nfo files. No-one is caught by surprise when it happens. They even say "try before you buy". All we do is, add some extra incentive.

Secondly, we do not do anything intrusive. Most of the protections freeze the GUI, but the audio is still intact (with few exceptions). They can still render their accomplishments to an audio file. The worst thing that happens is that we'll open our website in a browser.

If you think that's blackmail, hmmm, dunno. I think it's an invite to do the right thing, and it seems to work for some people who need a little poke. I think it's much better than crashing the system or plastering the screen with accusations.

Lastly, timebombs are the only way to outsmart crackers. There is no other working recipe - which can be explained by impressively when looking at their tools. It can hardly be our fault that this is the case, and that delayed checks / delayed reaction is quite obviously the key to defeat. I'm very certain that R2R have "relatively promising cracks" of our current releases, but they don't release them because they can't be sure.

And, quite frankly, they used our software, they may bloody pay for it. Please don't confuse victims with offenders here - I'm also bloody sure that if piracy didn't exist, we'd have twice the number of employees, and much better products.

[Urs]

Actually, also, we don't seed the cracks. The cracks are cracks cracked by crackers, they're not fake cracks seeded by us. We just add extra demo limitations that only work if the software detects that it is actually cracked.

[Urs]

… and if it's about the money… we think that those "almost cracks" contribute somewhat between 5% and 15% to our revenues. Hardly groundbreaking, but still around the cost for an employee or our Adwords and print efforts, or both. If our cracks exploded more often then we'd make more, but only if every developer did the same. Hence open sourcing our solution, which - as far as we disclosed it - was met with great interest.

[The_Hidden_Goose]

I can't see how it would be morally or philosophically equal or similar to pirating the software unless u-he were selling the pirated software. It doesn't affect anyone but people who are using non-legit versions.

It might be a pain in the backside to those who have said pirated versions, but so what? If they're prepared to invest their time in pirated software it's their problem if it stops working.

Speaking as someone who used pirated software for a few years while learning to see if this was something I wanted or could to do with my time, I can't see any problem with this approach. It seems fairer to paying customers as they don't have any extra hoops to jump through to satisfy u-he's security concerns, u-he doesn't lose out on sales due to people not wanting dongles, and a few of the people who used pirated versions end up actually buying it.

And even if u-he WERE seeding bad cracks - if it doesn't affect the people who pay for the software then why the hell not? What's so immoral about making it harder for others to take advantage of your business in that way?

I'm scratching my head to figure what the problem is with any of this.

[DavenH]

Software is not stolen, it can't be. To steal requires that you deprive someone of something that was in their possession by removing it and placing it elsewhere. A sale had never taken place, therefore sales can not be "stolen".

Lost revenue is the relevant issue either way... revenue is required to sustain business. Maybe more revenue is lost in the case of physical theft, maybe not. So why should infringement be a lesser evil than theft. It seems that it is semantic manoeuvering to salve the conscience when the damage is the same.

[ntom]

... Every crack makes our protection stronger, and I have a hard time imagining that loopholes are found easily.

Well...As I mentioned, I typically talk about your protection in light because as far as I know it works. Of course, I don't actually have any of your softwares I am just aware of the powerful copy protection.
I am honestly curious about seeing it in action, though. The black blob on the UI, the "sometimes in Demo mode in one instance, might be full in another" and all that. It sounds quite funny, and, actually, even more funny to think how infuriating it might be to a pirate.

EDIT:
I don't own any not because I don't want to, but just can't afford

[Uedi]

...

[DavenH]

Actually, also, we don't seed the cracks. The cracks are cracks cracked by crackers, they're not fake cracks seeded by us. We just add extra demo limitations that only work if the software detects that it is actually cracked.

Hah.

So the piece of code that detects if it's cracked doesn't itself get cracked? I just can't see how you make it work against the omnipotent, omniscient powers a cracker has. It's like bringing a knife to a gun fight and opponent gets to delete your knife.

[Nokenoku]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyXMhf0NbOU

Around 40:

Oh man ... this is really getting more and more sad ...
Those guys don't even seem to have any kind of guilty conscience about it.

That fact makes it even more bad, that FM shows this like it's the "normal" thing to do and nothing to be ashamed of.

Where's Sylenth2? Hm? Never happened and I imagine that part of the reason is that a nice chunk of income gets syphoned off by idiots who could easily afford the software but instead decide that because it has no physical properties it can be stolen.

I disagree.
If this is really a problem for Lennard, that's a problem on HIS side.

Let me be clear:
I think, what FM magazine and those artists with their cracked software do, is completely and utterly wrong and anti social.

But to develop software and then be like
"Mimimi ... someone cracked my software!!!!111 "
is just stupid and useless.

Software piracy was there from the very beginning and always will be.
The smart thing to do is to acknowledge this, and try to get the most out of it.

I don't even think, software piracy is critical (even has some positive effects on the industry). But it's an immense difference, if some beginner/student gets into making music by using cracks, or if some long term user or even well earning professional user of this software is still using cracks.

..., but when was the last time I recorded something? Not recently. Why bother? Nothing in it for me. So we all give our music away and hope we "take off" but in reality we just have devalued ourselves out of an income making music. Then we complain that there's not much great new music.

And I have to disagree again.
Making music only to earn money with it? That's an unpretty thought to me, and in my opinion a far bigger reason for getting loads and loads of crappy music, then the fact, that it is hard to actually live from making music.
Also living from making music was always hard and has nothing to do with music piracy.

(And then I personally think there's a lot of great music out there. You just have to find it.)

[Nokenoku]

sry for double-post

[Uedi]

...

[orange_ohm]

thank you.
i love you too!!!
now we must get used to it,the industry is promoting warez,maybe it feels a bit unusual but it is certainly the way to go,no?

Holy shit!!! Reading your post puts things in a different light!!! You might be on to something here. Maybe I missed the fact that this is the future and there's nothing we can do about it except roll with it because there is a behavioral trend of which at one time was unthinkable but now there are forces of fate working around us stating that it is an accepted practice in this day and age. Hell we don't see Orange Force or any of those guys on here bitching about it. But yet I'm ready to take up arms against this guy who represents the future. Maybe he's right and I'm wrong. Maybe all these successful cracked software using producers are the hip futuristic forward thinking leaders of tomorrow, and me the knight in shining armor with morals has been made into the dinosaur by way of changes around us that I refused to see. Thank you tee three tee succeeded by four o's. You have aligned my thinking with your purest form of logic which I embarrassingly overlooked. I bid you all farewell from this thread for I Sir Orbit-50 bow to the future of change. I will say no more on this subject.


.-.

Hi Sir Orbit-50
Sorry to go off topic, but since you mentioned me specifically (Orange Force)
I won't be "bitching about it" here because I no longer work for Ohm Force...

Anyway, one interesting fact that I learned during my years at Ohm Force about these successful DJs/Producers is that many of them don't want to spend their time buying and installing plug-ins. Instead, they hire one (or more) assistant to take care of all that.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that these successful "artists" aren't even aware that they're using pirated softwares sometimes.

[Orbit-50]

Hi Sir Orbit-50
Sorry to go off topic, but since you mentioned me specifically (Orange Force)
I won't be "bitching about it" here because I no longer work for Ohm Force...

Anyway, one interesting fact that I learned during my years at Ohm Force about these successful DJs/Producers is that many of them don't want to spend their time buying and installing plug-ins. Instead, they hire one (or more) assistant to take care of all that.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that these successful "artists" aren't even aware that they're using pirated softwares sometimes.

Oops! I just pulled the color orange out of my ass. Lol!! I knew you guys went by color but didn't know who was who. Thank you for the information. Sorry that you're not with them anymore