Cracks in figures

[bmrzycki]

Huh. When I first glanced at the title I thought it was the name of a track with the name referring to flaws in porcelain figurines...

This, however, is a much more interesting read...

[tehlord]

I suspect that a large percentage of the crack users probably wouldn't be customers anyway, and it's more likely they use cracks of everything they can get their hands on and simply load up one instrument after another browsing for presets that fit the tracks they're making in their cracked copies of Live or FL.

If you can make the timebomb more stringent, then I would do so.

[Urs]

We have to yet decide if we also want to impose more "demo restrictions" that work on the audio. While I think this is less friendly, it may increase our revenue from cracks dramatically.

I'm not sure why you're not doing this already. Seems the obvious way to go to me?

In the list of the pros and cons including the possibility of a false positive, it never reached the pro side.

Being friendly has been a strategy that worked so far. This is however not backed up by the comments we see on some piracy sites. A few days ago I had to read "Now it's discounted to $000 - MR.Heckmann might boil as a chicken Egg now!!" - so I think respect is hardly mutual. Which might lead to a tad more aggressive behaviour on our side as well.

Nevertheless, among all the arguments... someone who has used a Zebra crack for a year would certainly make a very good customer. He won't have any beginner's questions, he won't need much support. The question is, what kind of "invitation" does he need? - Which is where my bet is on "polite" rather than "annoying". Someone who's absorbed in anger won't open his wallet, while someone who chuckles may be.

[lnikj]

I can remember a climbing holiday in Switzerland more than 30 years ago where we ate at the same restaurant every night near where we were camping. On the table were breadsticks and crackers in a basket that one had to pay for when one's meal and beer were totted up at the end of the evening. One night my climbing partner decided, after we had paid for the evening, that he was still hungry and started opening a packet of crackers (for which he intended to pay) whereupon the waiter shot across the restaurant like a diving peregrine falcon screaming "Ein franc, ein franc, ein franc" at the top of his voice.

Perhaps when a producer is someway into his project they might hear Urs shouting "69 Euros, 69 Euros, 69 Euros" or somesuch

[xNiMiNx]

Huh. When I first glanced at the title I thought it was the name of a track with the name referring to flaws in porcelain figurines...

This, however, is a much more interesting read...

I misread it as cracks in 'fingers', thought it was going to be a guitar thread.

@ Urs; It is your software, and you should decide when/how people use it, i would just make this recommendation; if the time bomb affects the sound, make it something obvious. If its not blatant, these 'users' might spread negative 'feedback' on 'bad software', not realizing its the time bomb at all.

Maybe just have it start playing the Barney theme song

[Tricky-Loops]

Being friendly has been a strategy that worked so far. This is however not backed up by the comments we see on some piracy sites. A few days ago I had to read "Now it's discounted to $000 - MR.Heckmann might boil as a chicken Egg now!!" - so I think respect is hardly mutual. Which might lead to a tad more aggressive behaviour on our side as well.

You will never earn respect from them. In their eyes you're a big rich guy with truck loads of money while they're the poor pirate guys who are trying to set products free, so everybody can make music... They're feeling a bit like Robin Hood, y'know?

[bmrzycki]

[Urs]

Here's the effect of "ACE Day" on sales, for all months over 4 years:



You can see that the 17th of a month accounts for the largest sales - by far. It's somewhat more than 100 sales in total that we may attribute to that timebomb. So, 2 out of 8 sales a month are driven by the timebomb, that's 25%. Roughly.

The spike around the 25th is quite simply the spike at the initial release, I think I sold like 300 over the first few days (there were 333 early adopter coupon codes, and tehy lasted for more than a week)

- Urs

[Tricky-Loops]

BTW, aren't they organized now in the Piratenpartei in the Deutsche Bundestag?

[george]

First of all, we still have the good old 17th of each month. That's our "ACE day".

So your software calls home?

[Urs]

@ Urs; It is your software, and you should decide when/how people use it, i would just make this recommendation; if the time bomb affects the sound, make it something obvious. If its not blatant, these 'users' might spread negative 'feedback' on 'bad software', not realizing its the time bomb at all.

Maybe just have it start playing the Barney theme song

hehehe, yeah... it also works the other way round. I often see that people attribute a crash bug to the copy protection - "Oh it crashed, this crack is no good"

... but yes, we also play "polite" so not to be assumed buggy.

[Sendy]

It's cool how nonjudgemental U-he are to crack users. Some devs are like "If I even get a hint that any one of you may have at one time used a crack of our stuff or know someone who used a crack, I'll CRUSH YOUR SOUL!!!" and this vengeful kind of fist-shaking really makes you think "what if something goes wrong and I'm accused?". This take-no-prisoners approach seems to forget that a good portion of crack users ARE future customers. It also places every legitimate user on the frontline of a war that quite frankly scares me.

I'm also fairly sure a sizable majority of crack users aren't even poor. There have been studies that show the idea that poor people are more likely to steal should be questioned. We've seen plenty of established, money-making artists using cracks, I know of at least two local recording studios who use nothing but cracks and claim they do this because otherwise they wouldn't break even. Weak excuse, weak economy... we all know who the REAL trappers of the wealth are. They're the ones hoarding all their money in tax havens in an effort to wipe out the middle class

[Urs]

First of all, we still have the good old 17th of each month. That's our "ACE day".

So your software calls home?

Read the story - it displays a link on the GUI that people may click or not. it opens a browser window, no more, no less.

Thus calling this "the software calls home" is a blatant exaggeration.

We also have links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube tutorials and our support page in the plug-ins. Nothing wrong with that.

[Dominus]

However, some of our timebombs are really friendly. They just display a black hole on the UI or so. This means, the users can still bounce their tracks.

We have to yet decide if we also want to impose more "demo restrictions" that work on the audio. While I think this is less friendly, it may increase our revenue from cracks dramatically.

We've been discussing the use of "honeypots" for crackers to turn piracy into a marketing instrument. There's a great potential there, but it requires a way of thinking that's "not me". I'd much rather see piracy go away completely.

I'd say if you can make something go out of tune randomly, that would be enough to make people that are actually using the crack in production decide to buy it. That'd work well for both instruments and effects. If there's any false positives, it could be straightened out without too much screaming on the owner's part, as opposed to volume spikes or random noises/voices.

The levels of arguments are quite extraordinary. While we condemn piracy, "perfect copy protection" is only good if every company uses it.

From what I understand, iLok 2 hasn't been cracked, but we saw what happens when everyone uses it and it screws up. I have yet to see any plugin that's protected by iLok that I'd have to own. I do have a few on my iLok, but I use them less and less (I think I used one of them twice this year, in fact), and the only thing stopping me from selling them is that I'd have to give Pace money to do so, and I'd rather not give them another dime. I've mentioned your methods of copy protection many times on those iLok complaint threads, even though I don't own any of your plugins. (I haven't messed with electronic music in quite a long time, but Satin does look promising. If you ever came out with a Guitar effects plugin, I think you'd have me as a customer then. )

Some say, if our stuff wasn't cracked, people would use other stuff. They argue, one can't afford "not to be cracked" as long as others are cracked easily. Of course, this is taken with a large grain of salt.

It's controversial. By nature.

The thing is though, there's always "other stuff". There's so much freeware out there that you don't really need to pay for software anymore. Of course, there's no need to steal the stuff that you can't afford either.

I commend you for the way you're handling it though. You can stick it to the pirates without scaring off potential customers. I think that may be the most important thing.

[Urs]

Being friendly has been a strategy that worked so far. This is however not backed up by the comments we see on some piracy sites. A few days ago I had to read "Now it's discounted to $000 - MR.Heckmann might boil as a chicken Egg now!!" - so I think respect is hardly mutual. Which might lead to a tad more aggressive behaviour on our side as well.

You will never earn respect from them. In their eyes you're a big rich guy with truck loads of money while they're the poor pirate guys who are trying to set products free, so everybody can make music... They're feeling a bit like Robin Hood, y'know?

I think that crackers have a huge respect for us. I've been in email contact with Team Assign back in the days, which gave me an extraordinary insight into their thinking and mindset.

It's the leechers who thoughtlessly call us out. Maybe they have to, maybe it is some psychological trick to override their cerebral guilt center or something. As in, they simulate group rage to justify their actions.

As for becoming rich with plug-ins... allegedly we're ShareIt's top selling audio software company and I still make my way to work by foot, from a small rented appartment to an admittedly sizeable office space. Rich is different. My wife has a new car though, our 15 years old Golf collapsed earlier this year.