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Say what you want about DRM, but at least in the audio world, the best software is still DRMed, even after more than a decade of horror stories. In 1999 I revi

Say what you want about DRM, but at least in the audio world, the best software is still DRMed, even after more than a decade of horror stories. In 1999 I reviewed the Waves (http://www.waves.com/ http://www.waves.com/) Native Gold audio plugin bundle on the old ProRec.com. This software was protected by PACE AP DRM software (https://paceap.com/ https://paceap.com/). The thing about Waves is that it's a staple in the audio world and had already become a staple by 1999. Everyone uses Waves plugs. So Waves had a fairly inelastic demand function, but a small overall market. Enter DRM. The hateful anti-piracy software they used had some process that snooped around in memory, and if it found anything that it didn't like, it just warm-rebooted the computer. You'd be recording a vocal take, and BAM! the screen would go black, there'd be a beep, then the BIOS screen, and here comes Windows. No warning, no option to save, nothing. Recording session lost, files left open, disk state inconsistent. This is unacceptable even once, but the frequency of these intentional crashes was horrifying. In a normal day of use the workstation might crash 20 times or more, typically with some sort of consequential damage (lost work, lost files, corrupted disks, etc). Waves was unable to address the problem successfully for more than a year. Lots of professional workstations were affected, and a lot of customers were very angry. Nobody wanted to see Waves go under: everyone LOVED the products and wanted to continue to support development. But at the same time nobody could afford to install what amounted to horrible malware on their production workstations. So the pro audio community had simply evolved a workaround: buy the licensed software, but run the pirated software. Because the pirated software, lacking PACE AP, was perfectly stable. To this day, most good products in the pro audio community have DRM - many of them still run PACE software. Fortunately, problems are less horrific these days, but everyone in the industry knows the pain of showing up at a session without your Pro Tools dongle, or being at a gig and needing to reinstall a plugin, and there's no internet at the gig with which to validate your license. TL;DR it amazes me how much pain customers are willing to endure

bediger4000 10y ago
Say what you want about DRM, but at least in the audio world, the best software is still DRMed, even after more than a decade of horror stories. We don't really know what the presence of DRM means. It could be that DRM works in the audio world. Or it could mean that there's not that many producers of audio world software, and they're taking advantage of the situation. Or it could mean that there's some pernicious and near universal mental fault, a cognitive bias, so that DRM makes some kind of emotional sense if you're licensing software, rather than actually selling something. Or maybe there's a "gentleman's agreement", like the Apple/Google No Poaching pact amongst the vendors. Personally, I'm in favor of the cognitive bias theory. I think that the concept of ownership, extended to non-physical things, puts the producers of movies, music, software, etc into some weird psychological position where DRM just makes sense to them.

bediger4000 10y ago

Say what you want about DRM, but at least in the audio world, the best software is still DRMed, even after more than a decade of horror stories. We don't really know what the presence of DRM means. It could be that DRM works in the audio world. Or it could mean that there's not that many producers of audio world software, and they're taking advantage of the situation. Or it could mean that there's some pernicious and near universal mental fault, a cognitive bias, so that DRM makes some kind of emotional sense if you're licensing software, rather than actually selling something. Or maybe there's a "gentleman's agreement", like the Apple/Google No Poaching pact amongst the vendors. Personally, I'm in favor of the cognitive bias theory. I think that the concept of ownership, extended to non-physical things, puts the producers of movies, music, software, etc into some weird psychological position where DRM just makes sense to them.