Voxengo - protection policy?????

[Manc Chris]

Aye - its a paradox: - The harder an app is to crack - the more appealing it is to the crackers. Being challenged is what motivates them.

[dburgan]

Copy protection is a waste of time, and it punishes the paying customers without doing anything to halt or even slow down piracy. Personally I find passive watermarking to be a more useful tool. Doesn't stop the piracy but it does leave a trail of breadcrumbs that allows one to find out who leaked the product.

I don't think developers assume their customers are thieving scum. Quite the contrary - we value our paying customers even more because of warez! But the reality of piracy is this: most times a cracked product appears because a paying customer copied the product and gave it to someone, and it eventually found its way onto the warez nets. That's how watermarking is useful - at least you can backtrace a pirated copy and find out who leaked it. And it doesn't in the slightest interfere with paying customers or cause any hassle or inconvenience.

One thing that people might keep an eye on is EULAs. It wouldn't surprise me to see EULAs start popping up that explicitly state the end user is responsible for damages if their copy of the product starts showing up on warez nets. I'm a little uncomfortable with that idea but there it is.

[HanafiH]

Copy protection is a waste of time, and it punishes the paying customers without doing anything to halt or even slow down piracy. Personally I find passive watermarking to be a more useful tool. Doesn't stop the piracy but it does leave a trail of breadcrumbs that allows one to find out who leaked the product.

I don't think developers assume their customers are thieving scum. Quite the contrary - we value our paying customers even more because of warez! But the reality of piracy is this: most times a cracked product appears because a paying customer copied the product and gave it to someone, and it eventually found its way onto the warez nets. That's how watermarking is useful - at least you can backtrace a pirated copy and find out who leaked it. And it doesn't in the slightest interfere with paying customers or cause any hassle or inconvenience.

One thing that people might keep an eye on is EULAs. It wouldn't surprise me to see EULAs start popping up that explicitly state the end user is responsible for damages if their copy of the product starts showing up on warez nets. I'm a little uncomfortable with that idea but there it is.

It's in the nature of the beast that copy protection systems like dongles will evolve to the point where they effectively protect their products long enough in the market place. Even if the current crop of dongles is broken, it will have taken too long to break them in the commercial lifetimes of their products.

What is really interesting is that given effective protection is now possible, what impact networking effects have on relatively unprotected products. Consider: Sonar is cracked but SX3 (probably) isn't. So crack users will probably migrate to Sonar or other products that are still available. Will this have a meaningful impact on their commercial success?

The obvious logic dictates that the protected product, by enforcing payment, should be commercially more successful. But network effect dictates that the more widely used cracked product will succeed better over time, because of intangibles such as skill proliferation, crack to legitimate conversion, community size and third party support.

Interesting days.

[JeffSanders]

Why in the name of God would you want to use a warez'd Voxengo plug??! One of the coolest features here is the quality and quantity of Aleksey's free product updates. If you buy a new Voxengo plug this week, chances are it will kick even more ass next week.

[munchkin]

I've just reformated a hard drive partition (not my WinXP partition) from FAT32 to NTFS. Now all my Native Instrument plugins (Komplete 2 and various romplers) have to be re-registered. Bollox!

This is what disgusts me about certain types of C/P. I'm so glad you don't use this type of C/P for Voxengo plugins otherwise I would be doing a lot of re-registering because I have bought virtually everything you've produced. I buy your plugins because they are good quality and reasonably priced. I bought the new set within half an hour of testing it. I didn't have to think twice as with some of the plugins of other developers because you charge affordable prices.

I hope this never changes and you stay with the serial protection. I believe cracks will always appear but inconveniencing the customer with draconian protection just stops me buying a product. Amen!

[ahja]

the yellow tools dongle has been out for about a year and has nothing to do with steinberg

nor does the logic one

they are not cracked because modern dongles containing a mini computer are very difficult to emulate - then youve got all the dsp cards (many of whicha re dongles too) is there any cracked powercore, uad, scope plug-ins

nope

but this is getting well off topic - must try this set of plugs - does the delay finally mean i can stop pining for the logic one ?

i've seen cracks for powercore. i'm fairly confident there hasn't been a copy protection scheme that hasn't been cracked. the reason you're less likely to find a powercore plug cracked is it's less common. people who use cracks tend not to spend money on something like a poco anyway, hence less demand for cracks for it.

i'm glad voxengo doesn't use crappy iloks (like the grm tools i use does). anything more convoluted (no pun intended) than aleksey's current system is a waste of time and money for both parties imo. if there's a demand for cracks then it'll get cracked, whatever the copy pro scheme.

Being a Powercore user... 1.7 drivers where the last working version that allowed crack plugins to be used. Nothing cracked works on the Powercore due to TC's web based, personalized activition response. The Poco drivers are now at 1.9.3 and its crack free.

[nuisance sonore]

Mmmm, this thread raised a question. I have over 170 applications of all kind installed on this pc, most of it open source but also a lot of paid ones including VST's and VSTI's; now if every single one of them required a dongle, where would I put them all?

[pitchdrifter]

It is because every poco driver update can make a crack unfunctional again. And people who buy powercores aren't that many compared to the broad masses using audio software of some sort. Also they usually make money from using the powercore, where its totaly out of question to warez a plugin because paying for it ultimately makes you money quicker because it in some way increases the value of the product(well music)/service you sell.

Basically its not paying off in terms of effort vs "reputation" to crack these plugins.
So far there hasn't been any uncrackable things, only things not "worth" cracking (in terms of publicity gain for the group that is).

[ahja]

It is because every poco driver update can make a crack unfunctional again. And people who buy powercores aren't that many compared to the broad masses using audio software of some sort. Also they usually make money from using the powercore, where its totaly out of question to warez a plugin because paying for it ultimately makes you money quicker because it in some way increases the value of the product(well music)/service you sell.

Basically its not paying off in terms of effort vs "reputation" to crack these plugins.
So far there hasn't been any uncrackable things, only things not "worth" cracking (in terms of publicity gain for the group that is).

I dont know if I agree with you there. Do you mean to say that Virus or Sony or MD3 plugins are not worth cracking? The sony plugs for poco, WHERE cracked at one point. You know that right? As well as the Waldorf plugin. If what you say is true, then they would have given up on SX2.0, since 2.01 used different emulation in the dongle, 2.0.2, etc.. This makes no sense. Crackers take anything they can get... Even 10 dollar donationware.

If you owned a Powercore and registered a plugin with them... You would KNOW it's impossible. They send you a download link through email which you recieve by enter a serial number AND your powercore ID number. The DLL's that are in the download wont work on any other powercore. They are authorized by TC servers.

[pitchdrifter]

I'm saying the audience is rather small and the effort very high, because things would have to be cracked again every time theres a poco driver update being released.
Hence the little publicity achieved by cracking poco plugins doesn't justify the effort.

And I do own a powercore (non element), along with the full virus poco. And I also know the virus is personalized, i.e. compiled based on your hardware and poco ID when you download it.
This has nothing to do with whether or not its crackable. Its similar to software using dongles, only that dsp card plugins have the dsp cards for dongles.

[ahja]

I must have misunderstand then. Carry on...

[Alan]

Consider: Sonar is cracked but SX3 (probably) isn't. So crack users will probably migrate to Sonar or other products that are still available. Will this have a meaningful impact on their commercial success?

That's simply untrue,Sonar only requires a serial and doesn't need to be or has ever needed to be cracked,yet they outsell Steinberg(and any other DAW app) in the US by a fairly wide margin,I'm not sure about Euro sales figures.Also it takes about 2-3 weeks it seems to crack the latest dongle(s)(Iv'e seen the SX3 Dongle EMU and ISO floating around by the way) which makes that technology fairly useless and a waste of money by companies who pay for them and an even more useless headache for customers who suffer the problems and cost for nothing,besides the fact that Steinberg products seem to be the most plentiful and availible in the warez community anyway.The watermarking idea seems good in that it doesn't affect the paying customer,but since only a handful of people might pay for their crime,most will be unaware and pirate distribution will be largley unaffected,so your looking at yet another excersise in futility.This is the state of native at the moment.If DSP cards like UAD and Poco become neccessary and common place you'll be looking at the same exact thing native is going through right now,no doubt.It comes down to this at the moment,do companies want to waste money on dongle and software companies who's products only succeed in fustrating their paying customer? Or do they hope that companies like Cakewalk and Voxengo dissapear so there's no where to run after being chased away,and even if serial only companies dissapear,they'll only succeed in chasing customers over to the next competitor or hardware based solutions.I applaud companies like Cakewalk and Voxengo(and others)for treating their customers like customers and not potential theives and thankfully both companies make great products that have no chance in being bugged out(unlike many products I can name) by some useless and infringing scheme.Bravo.

[HanafiH]

Consider: Sonar is cracked but SX3 (probably) isn't. So crack users will probably migrate to Sonar or other products that are still available. Will this have a meaningful impact on their commercial success?

That's simply untrue,Sonar only requires a serial and doesn't need to be or has ever needed to be cracked,yet they outsell Steinberg(and any other DAW app) in the US by a fairly wide margin,I'm not sure about Euro sales figures.

Hi Alan, by 'cracked' I mean available in some form free from any protection. I'm interested in whether or not less stringently protected DAW applications actually do better in the market place than strongly protected apps because of network effects arising from the crack community.

Also it takes about 2-3 weeks it seems to crack the latest dongle(s)(Iv'e seen the SX3 Dongle EMU and ISO floating around by the way) which makes that technology fairly useless and a waste of money by companies who pay for them and an even more useless headache for customers who suffer the problems and cost for nothing,besides the fact that Steinberg products seem to be the most plentiful and availible in the warez community anyway.

Network effect predicts that strong protection can only be effective if all competing vendors in a market are equally strongly protected.

The watermarking idea seems good in that it doesn't affect the paying customer,but since only a handful of people might pay for their crime,most will be unaware and pirate distribution will be largley unaffected,so your looking at yet another excersise in futility.This is the state of native at the moment.If DSP cards like UAD and Poco become neccessary and common place you'll be looking at the same exact thing native is going through right now,no doubt.It comes down to this at the moment,do companies want to waste money on dongle and software companies who's products only succeed in fustrating their paying customer? Or do they hope that companies like Cakewalk and Voxengo dissapear so there's no where to run after being chased away,and even if serial only companies dissapear,they'll only succeed in chasing customers over to the next competitor or hardware based solutions.I applaud companies like Cakewalk and Voxengo(and others)for treating their customers like customers and not potential theives and thankfully both companies make great products that have no chance in being bugged out(unlike many products I can name) by some useless and infringing scheme.Bravo.

I think copy protection will arrive at a point where it can't be broken quickly enough. Perhaps that's not now, but it will eventually come. The crackers and the cracked will compete until the vendors arrive a technology strong enough. What I doubt is that doing this will do the vendors who protect their products in this way any good at all.

To avoid the partisan feelings people have about particular hosts: say that DongleX is an invincibly protected software DAW, CrackX is a widely cracked software DAW, say each has equal numbers of paid-up legit users, each is almost identical in feature set, and are the only two DAWs in the market. CrackX, like most major cracked offerings in all markets will have four to five times as many crack users for every legit user. This means that for any support issue involving hardware, there is a five to six times better probability that some other user of CrackX has a solution, than a user of DongleX. There is a five to six times better probability that an entry-level freeware developer will develop a succesful offering on CrackX. As crack users must purchase hardware, they will preferentially purchase hardware that supports CrackX best rather than DongleX best, at five to six times the volume. This makes CrackX preferential as a delivery target to hardware manufacturers and generates economies of scale for legitimate CrackX users.

[egbert]

Why in the name of God would you want to use a warez'd Voxengo plug??! One of the coolest features here is the quality and quantity of Aleksey's free product updates. If you buy a new Voxengo plug this week, chances are it will kick even more ass next week.

Absolutely - and many new features have been added in response to user requests. By not being overly anxious about copy protection Aleksey has spared us - his customers - the burden of nuisance schemes which really only punish legit users. Just another reason why I am happy to buy his great plugs.

[Cyprus]

There are a lot of issues surrounding cracked software, and it's not as simple as people make it out to be. For one thing, what's the chance of someone buying the piece of software if they find a pirated version? Almost every single person I know that downloads cracked software do so because they don't have the means to afford the real thing.

Then what the free marketing involved in distributing pirated software? Like it or not Fruityloops would not be as big as it is today if it wasn't for it being pirated. In fact, I'd be willing to bet pirated software has attracted tens of thousands of people (if not a lot more) to music production, which in turn has created more potential buyers.

Then what about all the potential buyers that have been deterred from making a purchase of software with a very unfriendly anti-pirating component?

I think what software developers have to do is make it enticing for those that would normally pirate software purchase their product. If you look at Sims 2 for instance, I realize it has nothing to do with music production, but what they did was release the game just like any other game, but you had to register the product to receive updates and other add-ons. The way the game was designed the add-ons were a huge part of the game since they were built by other players and could be shared directly from the Sim's website. I know a couple of people that after downloading the game and not being able to get the add-ons and extra features just said "screw it" and went out and bought the game.

So I think what music production developers need to do is offer more custom content in the community sections of their websites only for those that have registered. For instance it would be nice on Steinberg's website to have video tutorials that you could download to learn the program, or already created songs from top artists that you could download and see how they did what they did. The options are endless, just nobody is thinking outside the box. So I think music production developers need to take a hard look at instead of trying to deter people from pirating their software, enticing them to buy. That's the key.