Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Copy protection and music software

Author:Keola Donaghy
Posted:8/9/2000; 8:40:04 PM
Topic:Copy protection and music software
Msg #:19617
Prev/Next:19616 / 19618

Eventually we all relented, putting stickers on the outside of our shrinkwrap saying "Not copy protected." There was no way the users were going to give in.

You know what I find that is kind of ironic is that one of the last bastions of copy protection in the software industry is in those companies that create software for making music. The major players from my heyday - Opcode, Mark of the Unicorn, Digidesign, etc, - all had heavy-handed copy protection schemes, usually using key disks. Some popular Atari software for music used dongles.

I had to buy Digidesign's Protools for an audio archiving project last year, and I'll be damned if the software and even the plugins are key disk copy protected. We bought a couple of Blue G3's for the project on the recommendation of their rep, only to find out that they key disks did not work with the Imation SuperDrive. We had to wait about 3 months while their engineers figured out how to make the key disks work with the SuperDrive, though to be fair I believe there were some other Blue G3 issues with the software.

Opcode finally abandoned the key disk system and now sells the software as online downloads and emails you a serial number. I don't know if MOTU and others still copy protect or not.

When I spoke to reps of some of those companies bitching about the copy protection (I worked at a store that sold music hardware and software at the time, and ended up doing a lot of handholding), they said that said that musicians couldn't be trusted, and that when they sold unprotected software musicians had the gonads to call them for tech support on pirated software.

So much for respecting your users.

Aloha,

kd

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