NI have announced they will no longer activate discontinued products

[digitalboytn]

Cool story bro. Only the issue isn't the copy protection. The issue is that some of you think you're entitled to keep using a software product forever for free. You seem to think that even after using the products for 15 years or longer, you're still entitled to keep using it. And you even want NI to put money and resources towards it, just so you can keep using it.

That's the real issue here : A false sense of entitlement.

Get it ?

There is no sense of entitlement with regards to this issue...

But there is a legal obligation that NI made in the EULA to afford the end user continued access to the software.

I'm not sure that they was any time frame indicated with regard to that continued access,so NI have to maintain access...

The smartest thing I think that could do is make all of that older software freeware and be done with it...

Very few people will use it anyway because it is x86,but they have to make it available...

NI should look at the way they go about dealing with these issues because it has happened in the past and it was a mess..

Handing out a few coupons doesn't repair the long term damage to their reputation and their reliability

[yobare]

Why activate discontiuned products? Make no sense to me to activate products no longer available.

[codec_spurt]

It was talking in the context of empathy and "data driven" decision making. You're back hammering the old "x thousand year old" argument again.

That's NOT the issue here. The issue is COPY PROTECTION. Nothing more or less. People would rather NOT have NI involved in any way. The very best result would be to get rid of them out of the picture entirely! Just take the copy protection locks off, and give people the ability to install by themselves.

And, if they bizarrely demand that they retain full control over whether you can install this elderly software, then at least give written promises so users don't face the same issues x years down the line! But much better to modify things so we never need NI's involvement.

Get it yet? Apparently not.

Cool story bro. Only the issue isn't the copy protection. The issue is that some of you think you're entitled to keep using a software product forever for free. You seem to think that even after using the products for 15 years or longer, you're still entitled to keep using it. And you even want NI to put money and resources towards it, just so you can keep using it.

That's the real issue here : A false sense of entitlement.

Get it ?

Cool story bro.

Are you being intentionally obtuse?

Only the issue isn't the copy protection.

Only it is.

This has been done to death. It's just damage limitation now.

This sounded the death knell for NI for me. No more buying their software or hardware. I'm cutting my losses and getting out of the game. I'm moving to a hardware based studio anyway, and shit like this just confirms I was right to make that decision. I'll still keep a lot of software of course, even NI, I just won't be buying any more.

It's over now anyway.

Hopefully NI will make it possible for me to still use my beloved FM7. If not...

No matter what NI do from here on in, they are a company that can not be trusted. I will blacklist them and make sure I never put another single penny in to their pot. They need to be punished for this 'malicious' behaviour.

It will be interesting watching them try to dig themselves out of this hole.

Now there's entitlement for you ah?

No f**ks given by either party, it would seem.

Life moves on. I still get to make music.

Such callous indifference.

Music is supposed to be a beautiful uplifting and joyous experience. It can sooth the soul of the most savage beast. Or maybe just help to heal those that are a bit f**ked up. It does no harm, either way.

All I want from NI from now on is for them to make sure my current VSTs don't stop working. Because I won't be buying any more. If they go out of business and shit just ends. Such is life.

Look on my works ye mighty and despair.

So out of touch. Such tin ears.

Got me my new digital mixers, new keyboards, new FX units. Not a single NI thing in there did I buy. I was on the fence with regard to Maschine vs. Push, but I have a Maschine Mikro, so a new Push it is!

Native Instruments are a company that can never, ever, be trusted, ever again.

No matter what they do, they are finished as far as I am concerned.

entitlement?

Yeah, I pays my money and I takes my choice.

Markets change. Bad things happen. But you can still have a sense of human decency.

Native Instruments have jumped the shark. A free sound pack is not going to redeem them now.

I'm cutting the cord, jumping ship.

I'm entitled to do that, aren't I?

And who is going to stop me?

[yobare]

Duno why not send this to ni?

[AnX]

Why activate discontiuned products? Make no sense to me to activate products no longer available.

because ppl still use them, obviously

[Vertion]

That's the real issue here : A false sense of entitlement.

A gaslit bonanza!

Actually the is issue is ownership and control. The truth is people are fully entitled to what they own. Full control. Additionally, it is completely normal for people to feel that they own what they buy.

A vacuum cleaner performs a service, yet if I buy it, I am fully entitled to do whatever I want with it; even vacuum the lawn, or convert it into a barbecue grill.

Software uses legal trickery to keep itself somewhere in the grey area between a good and a service.

The reason people want the copy protection removed is they feel it is an owned good such as a purchased vacuum cleaner. Where others argue it’s a service.

As most people of wisdom come to understand, the law of man is complete nonsense and has little to do with ethics and morality. In America, it is a form of control and exploitation, just look at mass incarceration and the heavy focus on ethnicity.

Software makers can hide behind the legal trickery where the law establishes software as a service. But if a software maker betrays the raw human nature of ownership in trade, then beware their customer’s fury.

In my sincere opinion: Your words are dispelled. To label humanity’s natural entitlement to what they own as a falsehood, is deeply perverse and a betrayal to humanity itself.

[fedexnman]

Cool story Brah .... Here's my point blank statement NI should still authorize the " Customers " products . NI should honor the customers . They PURCHASED software that was authorize to use by NI whether it was some Windows95 or XP or prior Intel dinosaur Mac version compatible software or not , they should honor it and still make it available to use , why all of a sudden it's a problem and they scrap it because they want everyone to use native access and ditch the old stuff because it's not native access? ... I thought this thread had got resolved and everything was kosher but apparently not. Wow . And to all the cool story Brah folks y'all are really just some trolling mfkers and wait you'll have some problem down the road whether it be music software or a health problem and you'll be at that Dr. Office and the doc will be like cool story bro sorry I can't fix you hemrroids you just gonna have to be butt hurt the rest of your life deal with it ...(Dr puts sparkly sunglasses on ) ....

[Gamma-UT]

Cool story bro. Only the issue isn't the copy protection. The issue is that some of you think you're entitled to keep using a software product forever for free. You seem to think that even after using the products for 15 years or longer, you're still entitled to keep using it. And you even want NI to put money and resources towards it, just so you can keep using it.

That's the real issue here : A false sense of entitlement.

Get it ?

Poe’s Law strikes again.

[digitalboytn]

Cool story Brah .... And to all the cool story Brah folks y'all are really just some trolling mfkers and wait you'll have some problem down the road whether it be music software or a health problem and you'll be at that Dr. Office and the doc will be like cool story bro sorry I can't fix you hemrroids you just gonna have to be butt hurt the rest of your life deal with it ...(Dr puts sparkly sunglasses on ) ....

[noiseboyuk]

A more plausible scene:

NI: We're going to stop authorization on some old products:
KVR: You are an evil company! We will boycot you!
NI: Ah sheesh, ok, give us a momenet, let's see if we can come up with a better solution.
KVR: You are an evil company! We will boycot you!
NI: OK, we think we've got it. Good news: now everyone will be ok, no need to stop those old authorizations. Sorry for the upset!
KVR: You are an evil company! We will boycot you!

[fedexnman]

KVR vs NI

[PAK]

That's the real issue here : A false sense of entitlement.

People paid to buy (not rent) software. When some of these products were purchased online activation didn't exist. It was NI's choice, not the buyers, to subsequently introduce online activation with some of their updates.

When NI did this they, themselves, understood this created issues. They had created a dependency on them which previously hadn't existed. Now you, literally, couldn't use that software without their say so.

That's why NI went on to make promises, in it's own legal EULA document as recently as 2016, specifically regarding authorisation of that software. In effect, they promised not to do what they just attempted to do, and to provide solutions to end users.

Incidently, completely unrelated you understand, an investment firm called EMH gave Native Instruments $59 million in 2017. Now Native Instruments makes decisions "driven by the data" and not by their previous legal promises. Promises put there because someone, at NI, understood this stuff mattered.

The sad thing is this has wider implications for confidence in the whole software market, in terms of trust around activation methods like challenge response. In short, NI are proving many critics of software instruments correct.

If there's a sense of "entitlement", in any of this, it's been displayed by NI.

[AnX]

KVR vs NI

N. I. lost a looooong time ago

[revvy]

A more plausible scene:

NI: We're going to stop authorization on some old products:
KVR: You are an evil company! We will boycot you!
NI: Ah sheesh, ok, give us a momenet, let's see if we can come up with a better solution.
KVR: You are an evil company! We will boycot you!
NI: OK, we think we've got it. Good news: now everyone will be ok, no need to stop those old authorizations. Sorry for the upset!
KVR: You are an evil company! We will boycot you!

Not worth writing. 'Working' from home, I guess.

[dellboy]

Maybe some people do not understand the issue because they are young and just accept things as they are now and do not know software history.

Back in the late 1990s you could buy an Atari and run Cubase which came in a box and consisted of a number of floppy disks. The Atari had a cartridge port which Steinberg used for copy protection. Notator (now Logic on the Mac) also did the same.

If someone had this system and stored the whole lot in the loft and decided to to get it down to try it out it might still work when plugged in. The copy protection also will still work.

Most other software such as Cakewalk just used a serial number, and again, if you still have the original computer and disks and serial number it will still work.

Later on with the advent of the internet, challenge and response systems were invented. Most of us were wary of this new type of copy protection but were promised that the product that they were purchasing belonged to them perpetually in the same way as cartridge and serial protection did. This is where we find ourselves today with NI.

Customers at the time bought the software using this new fangled form of copy protection with a promise that it would always be made to work just like all the other forms of copy protection.