4 ms·

I remember hanging out on #3dwarez with the creators/artists from ILM and other major studios. They would trade cracked software because they couldn't reasonabl

I remember hanging out on #3dwarez with the creators/artists from ILM and other major studios. They would trade cracked software because they couldn't reasonably afford a 30k license for a new version but wanted to keep up to date or tinker with something new. Which is understandable. Hell I downloaded and uploaded millions of dollars of software and models from there. But to be fair I do give credit to 3ds studio Max for adding a countermeasure that slowly degraded models if it detected it was cracked. A few months the support forums were flooded with complaints and the company knew who was pirating. That was a genuinely hilarious countermeasure.

pests 8y ago
I don't really know how to respond to your last statements. I totally understand the creators blight of not being paid for someone using their work. Like others have said in this thread, especially now that I work in the field. I find an issue with the work output of the stolen tool being tampered with. Was it permanent? Could you restore full quality by purchasing or some other arrangement? To block access, or degrade functionality I find okay. To purposefully destroy someone else's hard work (even if made with stolen tools) just seems... wrong to me. Most of us here have done it. Think about opening up an old project's source code that you happened to write with a pirated copy of VS or Blender or what have you when you were young and couldn't afford things but still wanted to learn. To find it destroyed would crush me.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  As you developed something it would degrade over time, if you just had it saved somewhere nothing would happen to the file. The more you used the pirates copy the more your file would get worse. No you could not restore access to the original, it degraded the polygon count on models. I don't agree with this approach but it was pretty damn clever.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    What’s sad is all the waste: count up all the engineering time spent on all these more and more clever and elaborate copy prevention schemes, and count up all the time spent defeating them. The world will never get back the collective productivity wasted on this arms race.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      While the final implementation of the copy protection and code that cracked it are not particularly useful in the general sense I would assume those developers on both sides learned a lot in the process. It was a stupid waste of time outside of a valuable coding exercise. If I was on either side of that battle it would be on my resume.
- citrablue 8y ago
  FWLIW, I think there's a destructive poetic justice in the situation. It's not the noblest impulse -- to screw someone who you perceive screwing you -- but it seems eminently human. The delicious part is in the slow play. Would it be better to halt the creation, rather than degrade it? In that case, there would be no skill development in addition to no product, which seems objectively worse.
  - pests 8y ago
    Agreed as a whole but a small nitpick as that instant deactivation leads to instant cracking whereas slowly degrading might not be detected for awhile.

pests 8y ago

I don't really know how to respond to your last statements. I totally understand the creators blight of not being paid for someone using their work. Like others have said in this thread, especially now that I work in the field. I find an issue with the work output of the stolen tool being tampered with. Was it permanent? Could you restore full quality by purchasing or some other arrangement? To block access, or degrade functionality I find okay. To purposefully destroy someone else's hard work (even if made with stolen tools) just seems... wrong to me. Most of us here have done it. Think about opening up an old project's source code that you happened to write with a pirated copy of VS or Blender or what have you when you were young and couldn't afford things but still wanted to learn. To find it destroyed would crush me.

paulie_a 8y ago
As you developed something it would degrade over time, if you just had it saved somewhere nothing would happen to the file. The more you used the pirates copy the more your file would get worse. No you could not restore access to the original, it degraded the polygon count on models. I don't agree with this approach but it was pretty damn clever.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  What’s sad is all the waste: count up all the engineering time spent on all these more and more clever and elaborate copy prevention schemes, and count up all the time spent defeating them. The world will never get back the collective productivity wasted on this arms race.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    While the final implementation of the copy protection and code that cracked it are not particularly useful in the general sense I would assume those developers on both sides learned a lot in the process. It was a stupid waste of time outside of a valuable coding exercise. If I was on either side of that battle it would be on my resume.
citrablue 8y ago
FWLIW, I think there's a destructive poetic justice in the situation. It's not the noblest impulse -- to screw someone who you perceive screwing you -- but it seems eminently human. The delicious part is in the slow play. Would it be better to halt the creation, rather than degrade it? In that case, there would be no skill development in addition to no product, which seems objectively worse.
- pests 8y ago
  Agreed as a whole but a small nitpick as that instant deactivation leads to instant cracking whereas slowly degrading might not be detected for awhile.