Well, another iLok drama unfolding

Anything about MUSIC but doesn't fit into the forums above.
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Some nice read here:
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=353559&page=1

TL;DR: iLok has been arbitrarily deleting paid for licenses from peoples accounts and tells them not to bother contacting them for any support eg. PACE does not give a flying F about people having spent huge amounts of money or how they get it back.

Just another example in a long list why iLok and similar copy protection systems are a complete sh*t and fundamentally a punishment for paying customers.

If a dev uses this POS cp system it just deserves to be boycotted. Dongle or no dongle, it does not matter.
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I tried to read that but it's a monster of a thread.
As far as I can tell they've been deleting illegally sold licenses.
In which case, well...,
"I was wondering if you'd like to try Magic Mushrooms"
"Oooh I dont know. Sounds a bit scary"
"It's not scary. You just lose a sense of who you are and all that sh!t"

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"i bought what i thought was a legitimate license for Cranesong Phoenix 2. about 6 months later i get an email from ilok saying the license was put there by mistake and that i cannot contact ilok support."
:o :o :o :o :o :o
Last edited by murnau on Sun Apr 20, 2014 11:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

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Actually no, a lot of the people there have licenses deleted that they have purchased directly from companies like Waves and completely legit resellers. Also, as you probably know even second hand iLok licenses need PACE's approval before moving from one account to another, so they hardly can put any blame on the user.
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robotmonkey wrote:Actually no, a lot of the people there have licenses deleted that they have purchased directly from companies like Waves and completely legit resellers. Also, as you probably know even second hand iLok licenses need PACE's approval before moving from one account to another, so they hardly can put any blame on the user.
I still don't understand, sorry.

People are simply inserting their ilok and they discover existing licenses are vanishing?
There must be something else going on surely.
"I was wondering if you'd like to try Magic Mushrooms"
"Oooh I dont know. Sounds a bit scary"
"It's not scary. You just lose a sense of who you are and all that sh!t"

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Mushy Mushy wrote:People are simply inserting their ilok and they discover existing licenses are vanishing?
There must be something else going on surely.
It seems much worse than that. Some people are reporting that iLok licenses are being remotely deleted without the user syncing on their local machine.

The initial reports in that thread appear to be from people who have inadvertently purchased of dodgy license transfers (possibly duplicates left over from the previous iLok disaster), but some people are also reporting loss of 100% legit licenses.

Hard to believe that there can be no comeback on PACE for this, if the above is true.

Peace,
Andy.
... space is the place ...

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There seem to be several screw-ups by PACE there.

There are people who have bought licenses directly from Waves, Avid, Softube etc and these licenses are mistakenly deleted by PACE because they claim that these licenses should not be on the peoples accounts even though the people who bought them have done nothing wrong and the sales have been legit.

Some other people seem to have gotten duplicate licenses generated by PACE servers eg the license was sold but for some reason was not deleted from the sellers account. PACE deleted licenses from the peoples accounts who purchased them in good faith.

And in some other cases people have got demo licenses that actually worked as full licenses. In that case the deletion would obviously be justified.

But in any case it is another fail for PACE. It just show that iLok is not a trustworthy. As every license transfer needs PACE approval and a 25$ transfer fee paid PACE just can not go around randomly deleting peoples licenses and telling them to suck up the losses. It's another example how sh*tty copy protection puts all the risk on the paying customer. Just fancy coming in to studio in the morning and then finding out that you can not start working on any of the projects because PACE has deleted your licenses meanwhile.
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Hard to believe that there can be no comeback on PACE for this, if the above is true.
Not hard to believe at all. It's why I won't buy anything that uses PACE. Their history is a long one of exactly this type of abuse of customers. I have no problem at all with dongles/protection etc, it's PACE the company I have a problem with. They seem to always revert to type. Look back to the early PACE C/R copy protection and you'll see how it was basically a destructive virus that caused all kinds of pain to various legit customers' PCs and PACE devoutly ignored all complaints and continued churning out dodgy product. They're a crap company. Probably always will be.

I have no doubt some of the story will have been blown out of proportion, but with PACE in particular there is absolutely no smoke without fire. I put them in the same corporate cesspit as Sony (we'll sell you a $1000 DAT machine and when in 6 months it breaks down, you can just f**k off because we've decided to call you a professional if you use it for recording amateur music). 2 Companies I will never buy another product from.

PACE are leeches. Never shown any sense of business ethics and I doubt ever will.

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From what I've read, 3 things have happened:

1) The iLok server glitched and created many duplicate licenses. Some people thought "hey, I'm going to sell the duplicates" and they did. The licenses were then transfered to the buyers' accounts and all validated by iLok. Those illegitimately bought licenses are now being removed from the buyers' account and not from the sellers' account. So the latter still have the licenses and a nice pile of dough. The buyers lost everything.

2) Licenses which have been ligitimately tranfered are being removed from the buyers' accounts but are also unavailable in the seller's accounts. (so they just vanished)

3) Licenses bought directly from retailers like Avid, Waves, Urs and many others are being removed as well.

Seriously, I hope this is the end for iLok.
The only dongle system I use is eLicenser and they cannot remotely remove licenses from your dongle. (and will not create duplicates in the first place because there is no sync'ing to a master server)
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In no particular defence of Pace/iLok, but...
robotmonkey wrote:TL;DR: iLok has been arbitrarily deleting paid for licenses from peoples accounts and tells them not to bother contacting them for any support eg. PACE does not give a flying F about people having spent huge amounts of money or how they get it back.
ZenPunkHippy wrote:Hard to believe that there can be no comeback on PACE for this, if the above is true.
Of course they shouldn't give a flying F, and they don't need to either.

The correct route is to contact the developers first. They have access to a system where they can remove licenses "remotely". For example: if I ask Slate Digital to remove a demo license - or an expired one to clean out my account, they can do so.

If the company is being like "we dropped iLok support and we want you to move on to use our current C/P system", it's their right to do so. Pace is only providing the C/P system, the license handling is usually done through the developers.

The time I log into my account, the USB stick and my account is checked, then synced automatically. So chances are this all was handled through an update to turn the license into a time limited one.


I am surprised that nobody even remembers what happened years ago with Nomad Factory. They had(!!!) plugins modeled after Abbey Road studio modules. From one day to another, without warning, these plugins vanished and you couldn't access them on your rig anymore either. And yes, NF was with iLok years ago - so they pulled that license remotely.

robotmonkey wrote:Just another example in a long list why iLok and similar copy protection systems are a complete sh*t and fundamentally a punishment for paying customers.
This time, I think iLok is not to blame alone.

At this point, we don't know what's really going on. Remember that there was the so called "iLokalypse" - maybe they cleaned out their servers and in the process, some data got lost.

But instead of getting both in touch with the developers and iLok to ask what's going on, it's easier to blame the common ground: the C/P system and it's develoers.

Of course, I am not the least surprised, that it's once again on an AVID board where people went haywire first. I didn't know that AVID had a huge share of Pace/iLok.


robotmonkey wrote:If a dev uses this POS cp system it just deserves to be boycotted. Dongle or no dongle, it does not matter.
Then it's their fault, isn't it? Not Pace/iLok's...

Of course, automatic updates (without notice) and keeping quiet about something is not a really great move. Pace proved that during the "iLokalyspe" that it's not their strong points.

But let's look at it from a realistic point of view:
That company get's a lot of sh*t from all sides. Before iLok2 came out, plugins were cracked within hours. Now that this system is somewhat save from cracking, it still get's a load of critism. A server crash issue (during the transition, which was no transition at all unfortunately) and people instantly go haywire. Rather than asking at all places what'S up, it's always the CP system provider that get's the critism.

Yes, Pace/iLok could do some things better. But not, they're not always to blame.


robotmonkey wrote:Actually no, a lot of the people there have licenses deleted that they have purchased directly from companies like Waves and completely legit resellers. Also, as you probably know even second hand iLok licenses need PACE's approval before moving from one account to another, so they hardly can put any blame on the user.
Again, this could be a server glitch from either side (iLok or the developers). We also don't know how often the user connects/syncs to the iLok server. So chances are that somebody might have overlooked a timed license (which got accidentally switched to one) - or during sync, the licenses were "cut off".

Various scenarios come to mind.
And yes, I also had similar issues - but I contacted the devs (not iLok) and we sorted it out. I also just checked my account/my licenses... everything is fine over here. And if not, I know who I can contact.


Mushy Mushy wrote:People are simply inserting their ilok and they discover existing licenses are vanishing?
There must be something else going on surely.
Again, I suspect a server glitch somewhere, or a flush of "unused licenses".
If it vanishes without further mention, and you haven't logged into your account in quite a while, not to mention that your rig is offline, chances are that there was a glitch and your regular license turned into a timed one.



Again - not necessarily defending iLok - just giving a different point of view.



EDIT:
Just saw the posts prior to mine - and yes, this looks like a server glitch. Who caused it, don't know. But if there is an issue, contact both iLok and the devs in question.

Why is that so difficult? Why is it always "I hope this is the end if iLok"?

They funked up, yeah. No CP system is save of issues. And we really don't know at this point what's up. Could be a tried hacking job to crash the license server - then that particular group/person are huge asses at the cost of others.

It could be a server glitch (which clearly looks like it), so this could be cleared with contacting the devs of the tools in question. They have more rights to piss at Pace/iLok's leg. And what I hear from Beta Testing, they constantly do so.


Of course it's annoying and time consuming. And I can more than relate if something like this happens - especially on weekends or holidays. But it isn't the end of the world.
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Compyfox wrote:Why is that so difficult? Why is it always "I hope this is the end if iLok"?
They funked up, yeah. No CP system is save of issues. [...]
Of course it's annoying and time consuming. And I can more than relate if something like this happens - especially on weekends or holidays. But it isn't the end of the world.
How about all the professionals out there who rely on these plugins on a daily basis, who have deadlines, and can't work because of this?
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I would take Compyfox's analysis more seriously if he actually RTFA (at the DUC forum) instead of commenting on the thread title and what other commenters have said!
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First, copy protection system should absolutely never give a paying customer any grief. 100% never. End of story.

If you have deadlines and such you are just not going to go around contacting devs and PACE and waiting until they blame each other. Finding out in the morning that out of the blue you can not use your paid for plugins anymore does just not ruin your day but in many cases can result in measurable financial loss.

And second, PACE support has stated in that thread that it was indeed their doing. So it is another clear case of fail for PACE.
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Recently I bought a yamaha thr10 with a version of cubase installed. I went through the install process only to find out later that... like all Steinberg products it requires iLok. Screw that, into the recycle bin it went.
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Here are the employees that work for Pace. Everyone should write them a nice message:

http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/f?type= ... 8021057052
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