How To Encourage Buying Legal Software Options

[Aurelius]

Obviously cracks are very abundant out there. But believe it or not people would rather have legal software if they are given the opportunity to do so, why? because they can freely talk about it in public with other people in the industry or on the net like in forums or user groups without being ashamed or fear of being questioned or branded as a crack user. People want to be proud of what they use.

The majority of crack users are often kids or students who are just starting to get their feet wet on the industry.

And all this software and its costs are a bit overwhelming to them. I know this because I teach a class and I have always encourage my students to use legal software to support the industry. I use legal software myself because I work professionally where it is frowned upon to be using cracks and I need to show an example to my students.

But I perfectly understand when a student chooses to use crack software instead of the legal ones because software companies are giving them such a hard time on licensing and pricing costs some of which that are out there are completely absurd. Once, I had one student that wanted to buy a certain iLok protected software but it was a bit too expensive for him so asked him to look for academic pricing there was none to be found even directly from the company so what do you think is he using now?

I think these measures could greatly help encourage the use of legal software:

1. Every company should be required to have academic pricing for all their products so that students can be encouraged to buy and use them legally early in their careers and by this I don't mean complicated school verified academic pricing in which you need the your school Principal or Dean's signature on a school's official form just to be eligible, because more often than not students just won't bother to go through that, a current official school I.D. or enrollment receipt should be enough.

2. Get rid of the useless money making fees like transfer fees, for example company A charges you an extra $100 just to transfer a product license that you own on top of the $20 the iLok charges you, why should you pay for the transfer of a software that you already own? makes no sense especially at that amount. There are numerous companies that does this. Annual fees for products that you own, I think we all know who's the guiltiest company of this. These fees are discouraging to most and would rather not engage with a company that has them.

Instead of relentlessly improving the license security systems of all the software that's out there, wouldn't it make more sense to be more open and be more inclusive towards all customers for your products by making them more accessible legally.

This post has been edited by Aurelius: Nov 22 2008, 10:21 AM

[d3drocks]

well, if you dont offor a demo (cough Cubase! cough) people are going to crack it to see what it is like. not that this is fair, its just what people do.

I tried the demo of FL-Studio years ago, and now i am a paying customer of fl-studio XXL edition.


i very strongly agree with point # 2 you made.
companies really enjoy restricting their paying coustmers, treating them like enimies, pirates, and what not. i lost my licence of photoshop because of this. my hard disk had to be formatted, and i tried to install photoshop. i called the hotline to ask for re-activation, and they said no, that i am a pirate, and invalidated my key. (adobe can kiss my ass),

this is something that the FL-Studio team does very well. even though FL-Studio is probably the most widely cracked audio application out there, the developers and tech support people are very friendly and helpful on their forums.

another way to slow down cracking:
Free versions instead of Demos.
example: www.sonomawireworks.com
these people make the audio app "riffworks". they recently discontinued the demo of riffworks, and replaced it with a slightly free version. having used that free version for a while now, i am probably going to go pick up a copy at Long & Mcquades soon.

i have been boycotting software using things like Secu-rom software. the video game industry is starting to use it and it is extremely agrivating.
i have a copy of Amplitube Duo as bundeled with pro-tools, and i installed it reluctantly. i was considering just using the demo because i dont want to use up my 5 registrations when my hard disk fails (which seems to happen alot).

In a way, anti-piracy applications are very much encouraging cracking, and the teams cracking the applications are pushing the study of cryptology.

all i can say is:
www.ubuntu.com
ubuntu linux. their repositories have tons of high quality free audio applications, in adition to their amaizng operating system.