Acustica Audio still does not allow license transfers and violates European laws

[poshook]

Acustica Audio = great products but rude customer communication.
It is what it is, take it or leave it.

I've been a Nebula 3 Pro user for more than 10 years and I just ignore the 'blunt' tone of the developer and his staff.

We try to explain straight to all questions.
Please note I was accused to be a liar.
At this point I'll shut up
It doesn't matter if we try to be nice adding licenses when someone needs them. It doesn't matter if we try to refund all unhappy customers, even after the number of days the EU tells us. It doesn't matter if we exchange products for free when the customer needs something better. It doesn't matter if we try to satisfy ALL request we receive, even if most of time we receive very poor nice words. It doesn't matter if I tried to be nice answering politely to the accuse of being a liar or a bad manager. It doesn't matter we provided free updated and upgrades. Other companies are "better". I'm a liar and even a bad representative for the company. The company should be "backlisted". Maybe we don't keep promises. The only mistake is that I try to speak with you, maybe i should do like most of other companies are doing, they are often just 2-3 guys or less and the ceo never answers to anybody, there is no risk to being involved in this mess.
Better if I stop answering to customers, I'll use my time in a better way.
Guys we don't provide license transfer today, if you think your rights are not respected I encourage to not buy anything from us. Let me tell you a short story, other people who asked something politely were satisfied in ANYTHING, way more than way the law enforces. I encourage all people calling me a liar to not be a customer any more
Poshook, I'll try to help you to sell ALL your products if you promise to me to not buy anything more from us. I consider the accuse of being a liar very seriously.
Have a nice day

There is a lot of emotions but no proper argument. The reason I was calling you a liar is that you gave as a little crime story about illegal reselling of your plugins as the reason for 2 years long suspension which is simply not truth. I believe that you had troubles with some conman who was reselling fake licenses. BUT I do not believe that this story is the main reason for 2 years long suspension affecting all legal customers. And your spontaneous reactions on my topic including those you have erased confirms this clearly. Your first reaction on this topic was "So can you sell a microsoft office license? How does it work?" which means that you do not want to allow license transfer instead of you can not.

So the question is not what does motivate me to call you lier but what does really motivate you to change the approach towards customers.

[dark water]

Acustica Audio = great products but rude customer communication.
It is what it is, take it or leave it.

I've been a Nebula 3 Pro user for more than 10 years and I just ignore the 'blunt' tone of the developer and his staff.

We try to explain straight to all questions.
Please note I was accused to be a liar.
At this point I'll shut up
It doesn't matter if we try to be nice adding licenses when someone needs them. It doesn't matter if we try to refund all unhappy customers, even after the number of days the EU tells us. It doesn't matter if we exchange products for free when the customer needs something better. It doesn't matter if we try to satisfy ALL request we receive, even if most of time we receive very poor nice words. It doesn't matter if I tried to be nice answering politely to the accuse of being a liar or a bad manager. It doesn't matter we provided free updated and upgrades. Other companies are "better". I'm a liar and even a bad representative for the company. The company should be "backlisted". Maybe we don't keep promises. The only mistake is that I try to speak with you, maybe i should do like most of other companies are doing, they are often just 2-3 guys or less and the ceo never answers to anybody, there is no risk to being involved in this mess.
Better if I stop answering to customers, I'll use my time in a better way.
Guys we don't provide license transfer today, if you think your rights are not respected I encourage to not buy anything from us. Let me tell you a short story, other people who asked something politely were satisfied in ANYTHING, way more than way the law enforces. I encourage all people calling me a liar to not be a customer any more
Poshook, I'll try to help you to sell ALL your products if you promise to me to not buy anything more from us. I consider the accuse of being a liar very seriously.
Have a nice day

Giancarlo, you've quoted my one comment in this thread but then you have included information in your reply which doesn't seem to have anything to do with my comment.

Either way, I don't base my judgement of your products or your communication style on this thread.
I base it on how I know Nebula 3 Pro to have worked extremely well during the past 10 years for me, and also, less happily, on the email conversations I have had during the past 10 years with you and your company representatives (most notably when I have had an issue with re-licensing after a clean install).

The poster below me on the previous page makes a good point about better PR for your company.
However, to be frank, as long as a software product works (and Nebula 3 Pro works very well for me), I can put up with blunt/rude conversations from a development team.
I wish you a nice day too.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Guys could do wrong things, just signal cases to me. To my knowledge they are providing new licenses when asked

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Acustica Audio = great products but rude customer communication.
It is what it is, take it or leave it.

I've been a Nebula 3 Pro user for more than 10 years and I just ignore the 'blunt' tone of the developer and his staff.

We try to explain straight to all questions.
Please note I was accused to be a liar.
At this point I'll shut up
It doesn't matter if we try to be nice adding licenses when someone needs them. It doesn't matter if we try to refund all unhappy customers, even after the number of days the EU tells us. It doesn't matter if we exchange products for free when the customer needs something better. It doesn't matter if we try to satisfy ALL request we receive, even if most of time we receive very poor nice words. It doesn't matter if I tried to be nice answering politely to the accuse of being a liar or a bad manager. It doesn't matter we provided free updated and upgrades. Other companies are "better". I'm a liar and even a bad representative for the company. The company should be "backlisted". Maybe we don't keep promises. The only mistake is that I try to speak with you, maybe i should do like most of other companies are doing, they are often just 2-3 guys or less and the ceo never answers to anybody, there is no risk to being involved in this mess.
Better if I stop answering to customers, I'll use my time in a better way.
Guys we don't provide license transfer today, if you think your rights are not respected I encourage to not buy anything from us. Let me tell you a short story, other people who asked something politely were satisfied in ANYTHING, way more than way the law enforces. I encourage all people calling me a liar to not be a customer any more
Poshook, I'll try to help you to sell ALL your products if you promise to me to not buy anything more from us. I consider the accuse of being a liar very seriously.
Have a nice day

There is a lot of emotions but no proper argument. The reason I was calling you a liar is that you gave as a little crime story about illegal reselling of your plugins as the reason for 2 years long suspension which is simply not truth. I believe that you had troubles with some conman who was reselling fake licenses. BUT I do not believe that this story is the main reason for 2 years long suspension affecting all legal customers. And your spontaneous reactions on my topic including those you have erased confirms this clearly. Your first reaction on this topic was "So can you sell a microsoft office license? How does it work?" which means that you do not want to allow license transfer instead of you can not.

So the question is not what does motivate me to call you lier but what does really motivate you to change the approach towards customers.

The reaction is because the accuse of violation.
I want to do it not because a court is enforcing, but because it is a good service. But I need a better website, where rules are easy to spot. I don't want a crowd of illegal resellers (and the best way preventing it is to put rules... Ie limiting coupons to people selling too much items)
Two years ago the reason was just that one. Then we opted for abandoning PayPal for the new website, because the intersection between PayPal rules and the reselling trend is leading to crazy problems. By the way, no problem to discuss it in a court, at the cost to stop selling things in this Europe. We'll do better in other countries, there are 230 countries right there, while these 26 between moss, vats and invoices are taking as many resources as the other 214
No problem if you have a single case, you don't need to pay a fee today, just ask
But after this lacking if trust I suggest to sell all your items and stop using our things. When you buy a product from acustica you are buying the "company"- not a product. If you don't trust the company just avoid its products, it's a loose - loose situation for everyone

[Fleer]

All in all I find Giancarlo to be an upright guy, trying to solve the problem as best he can. Kudos to him. I appreciate his heartfelt arguments. And I do hope he continues to sell to Europeans as well.

[Debutante]

i can't believe this. this thread belongs in hyde park.

firstly where the hell does it say that you are required to offer resale for purchased goods?? Software is not like a car FFS. I dealt with giancaro&co and had no bad experiences e.g.

- when i first got nebula i gave them the wrong email address - hehehe - nothing doing (as a result I own that "bad" addres now too - .ca vs .com)
- i decided to buy nebula 3 pro after having v2 since 2011 and LAST YEAR they actually allowed me to pay just the difference on an upgrade plan that didn't even exist anymore.

If you behave in civil manner, most devs are dying to hear about your experiences etc. with their software. When you act like a fukin twat with a tusk up your ass and think that purchasing something also buys you licence to act like a twat with a tusk up his ass, then f**k of and throw your period water elsewhere.

I bought nebula with the express understanding that I CAN NOT SELL IT. CASE CLOSED and so too should this thread.

uummmmmm - not looking to get banned. sometimes someone needs to say what the devs can't, having to reply to eedjuts like this.

[masterhiggins]

If you wanted to discourage secondhand sales, couldn't you just charge a transfer fee to make it cost-prohibitive for the customer to resell it? Seems to work for fxpansion....

[kmonkey]

If you wanted to discourage secondhand sales, couldn't you just charge a transfer fee to make it cost-prohibitive for the customer to resell it? Seems to work for fxpansion....

That's super nice idea.

Zaphod i told you you don't listen.

Now KVR idiots are claiming you are a liar offering non existing crime stories. See now you have to provide them a proof and even if you do they will then spilt hairs and tell you you did not acted as they KVR specialist would.

See i told you few pages before that we are not that far away from conspiracy theory.

Next time you listen. I am here more then decade and can smell KVR trolls from a mile. Today situation is even worse. You have trolls + KVR product specialist + KVR Sherlock Holmes + KVR Antivirus experts + self proclaimed saviors of public. Then there are Aliasing Hunters and 3rd order harmonic experts.

Look man this is very dangerous place for normal people like you.

If you don't listen and stop now (just ignore idiots, they don't do harm, this is KVR normal people know to read between the lines) next thing is - public vote poll, burn witch fest and Acustica being portrayed as an empirical evil company with outrageous customer support - which is complete lie supported by feeding KVR idiots and trolls.

Stop now or you'll have a story more convoluted then what Ridley Scott tried with Prometheus and ended with Covenant fiasco.

[incubus]

Well, we all know that EVERYONE that has a difference of opinion is a troll

Outside of the colorful language, I don't know what to say. On one hand the OP is correct. On the other, a company should be able to do what they want.

After filtering everything I'm pretty sure that this is a stale-mate and can't be resolved. Frankly, I can't blame either side.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Ok I think I have a good idea and possibly a very fair set of rules on next days you'll see the announcement on our forum

[Akanishta]

Basically people are using hacked PayPal accounts for buying and selling. When a fraud is raised PayPal reverts the transaction. So there is not a "bought" any more. PayPal does it because the item is a software download.
At this point I should remove the license from the user account because he didn't pay. He would be DAMAGED. The situation happened several times in germany and we decided to provide free products to the user so WE were damaged. At this point we suspended it and guess what? There are no frauds any more.

So people hack PayPal accounts and the way they decide to exploit that is by coming up with an Acoustica license buy/resell scheme? Aren't there easier ways to make a buck?

Maybe I just don't understand what was happening...it makes no sense to me.

It's actually pretty common because of PayPal's rules. We had someone on here doing it with Steinberg software not long ago.

People are ragging on the developer, but they really only have two options since they're not in business to give everything away for free.

They can:

1- Do what they're doing and suspend transfers to prevent fraud.

Or,

2- When someone gets screwed over by a scammer, they could tell them tough luck and they're out the money and no software.

[DrGonzo]

If you behave in civil manner, most devs are dying to hear about your experiences etc. with their software.

Well put. And that's goes for absolutely everything in life.

/C

[ATN69]

Basically people are using hacked PayPal accounts for buying and selling. When a fraud is raised PayPal reverts the transaction. So there is not a "bought" any more. PayPal does it because the item is a software download.
At this point I should remove the license from the user account because he didn't pay. He would be DAMAGED. The situation happened several times in germany and we decided to provide free products to the user so WE were damaged. At this point we suspended it and guess what? There are no frauds any more.

So people hack PayPal accounts and the way they decide to exploit that is by coming up with an Acoustica license buy/resell scheme? Aren't there easier ways to make a buck?

Maybe I just don't understand what was happening...it makes no sense to me.

It's actually pretty common because of PayPal's rules. We had someone on here doing it with Steinberg software not long ago.

People are ragging on the developer, but they really only have two options since they're not in business to give everything away for free.

They can:

1- Do what they're doing and suspend transfers to prevent fraud.

Or,

2- When someone gets screwed over by a scammer, they could tell them tough luck and they're out the money and no software.

As they say, I don't have a horse in this race and I am not taking any sides here, but there is one thing I don't get here. A licence transfer transaction would be between the current owner of the license and the buyer of that license, not Acoustica Audio. So if anyone get screwed due to fraud it would be between the seller and the buyer of the license as far as I see it. That can never be Acoustica audio responsibility. In this kind of case Acoustica audio is out of the Picture, and It would be unreasonable for any customer to approach Acoustica audio, crying and demanding a real license just because they happened to get screwed. In the KVR second hand market it is clear that the buyer and seller have all the responsibility and the developer have zero responsibility.

For new license purchases, directly from Acoustica Audio, using a hacked Paypal or any other means, it would be Acoustica audio that face the risk of getting screwed in case of a scam. The only way to prevent that would be to stop Selling anything what so ever, which would not make much sense for obvious reasons , but the risk is exactly the same as for license transfers. Obviously Acoustica audio still keep Selling things despite that risk

[Armagibbon]

Good popcorn thread over here.

I gotta say, acustica gets 5 stars for dumbest licensing scheme ever. Tied to a hardware image and it's one and done? Way to think ahead amigo. Not.

[Akanishta]

As they say, I don't have a horse in this race and I am not taking any sides here, but there is one thing I don't get here. A licence transfer transaction would be between the current owner of the license and the buyer of that license, not Acoustica Audio. So if anyone get screwed due to fraud it would be between the seller and the buyer of the license as far as I see it. That can never be Acoustica audio responsibility. In this kind of case Acoustica audio is out of the Picture, and It would be unreasonable for any customer to approach Acoustica audio, crying and demanding a real license just because they happened to get screwed. In the KVR second hand market it is clear that the buyer and seller have all the responsibility and the developer have zero responsibility.

For new license purchases, directly from Acoustica Audio, using a hacked Paypal or any other means, it would be Acoustica audio that face the risk of getting screwed in case of a scam. The only way to prevent that would be to stop Selling anything what so ever, which would not make much sense for obvious reasons , but the risk is exactly the same as for license transfers. Obviously Acoustica audio still keep Selling things despite that risk

That's exactly what's happening though. The scammer gets a hold of a hacked Paypal account, then buys a ton of plugins. They immediately register them and then put them up for sale on the used market. The unknowing used buyer pays their money to the scammer's real Paypal account and the licences get transferred. By the time the hacked Paypal accounts gets closed, the scammer has already sold the plugins and collected the real money, and Paypal has reversed the funds paid to the developer for the software. So it IS the developer that gets screwed in the end. And like I mentioned above, the developer has two options.

There have been a lot of developers that have talked about these scams so it's not just Acustica.