When I decided to invest some money in a good “mixing tools” bundle…I decided to buy a UAD instead of Waves…and mainly because I don’t like WAVES attitude…I didn’t like Digidesign attitude long time ago…so I sold happily my ProTools and finally I had nothing to do with their customer care services.
and I love to give my money to developers as AUDIO DAMAGE for example.

let BAN+WAVES spend money on that…they will be forgotten soon…and possibly they will open a credit card company later on…(I don’t have/want a credit card neither…so I will not need their services even then).

Assaf – once again, what you say is correct. But if you actually ask people who work at the kind of facilities that are being targeted, whether they use pirated software or not, most would say that the methods being used are devious and underhand. Therefore, a serious amount of damage has been done to customer-vendor good-will. Whether or not this is right or wrong is irrelevant – changing the way people think requires a lot more than brute-force use of the law. You need to look at society and the way that exploitation and legitimized corporate robbery work, and how they affect peoples’ perceptions. Of course there is no way that this is going to happen soon. But resorting to blinkered policing is not going to help either.

People know that audio software is fundamentally not the same as audio hardware. With hardware do you get new features/OS upgrades etc for free? Maybe sometimes, but it’s relatively rare. However, does hardware stop working if you update your computer OS or sequencer? Very unlikely. If someone has a serious business using your software, the chances are they will buy it for the benefits of good support, updates, bug-fixes with new versions of OS/sequencers and so on. If they don’t, they generally spend more time chasing cracked updates and making them work on their system, than actually working with the tools. I think that intelligent users always tend to make the right choice. There are 2 things you always have to remember about stupid users: 1 – you cannot account for their existence and 2 – there are a hell of a lot of them in the world.

If you can keep developing the product well for legitimate users, the good-will adds up to more sales (and, sure, more piracy). IMHO this is what a software company needs to do to survive.

Piracy has always been and will always be a cost to factor in to the budget – just like material/component supply problems, electrical safety ratings etc are cost factors for a hardware manufacturer.

Waves and their WUP and banpiracy.org strategies are alienating present and future customers. You always have to remember that software is a transitory, almost intangible tool to most users. If something about a program or vendor annoys you, these days there is so much software out there (and so many programmers) that you can try out an alternative that’s often free (freeware/open-source etc) and abandon what you were using before very easily.

Personally I can see very markedly the effect that piracy has had on the market. In general, big commercially released plugins tend to be very ’safe’ and unprogressive, so that there’s the maximum chance of a decent return. In fact, I think freeware arguably does as much harm to the lack of progressiveness of audio software – there are huge amounts of very good, free, experimental tools out there, so the chances of selling something built on a commercial budget are very slim when people are prepared to use 5 or 6 free tools that can do similar things when used together in a certain way.

What it all comes down to is that people are just very broke right now. The ruthlessness of the global economy is hitting very very hard at the moment. It’s not even possible to make much money out of making music. It’s pretty sad, but it is still possible to survive if you do business in the right way.

I understand completely what you’re saying. However I feel a bit lost in this discussion, because I’m defending a principle (not very successfully, perhaps), while most people here are referring to a particular case (and, by the way, as far as I’m concerned the jury is still out on whether Waves is “good” or “bad” – I’ve also heard many good things about them. Never dealt with them myself).

It’s just like having a police officer look the other way when a bunch of people are beating up some obnoxious guy nobody likes – and for the sake of argument let’s say Waves is a bunch of sons-of-bitches (once again, I don’t subscribe to this P.O.V). Sure, there’s some sense of satisfaction in seeing the obnoxious kid get paid back for years of being obnoxious, but are we really willing to look the other way while he gets beat up? Do you really want to live in such a society where people can exercise their own idea of personal justice? I don’t. Waves have the RIGHT to sue the socks of anyone who plagiarizes them – and does so quite blatantly, while making money off the goods he has pirated.

The above policeman example serves to illustrate a point: reality is what we make it. If we look the other way, then going down hard on pirates will have no effect. But if we voice our support for the RIGHT of waves to defend their property, we will be paving the road to a better future. Even if you think “Waves isn’t worth it, they’re obnoxious, I won’t back them up” – think again. It’s not Waves you’re backing up, but your own moral and social integrity.

However in many ways the world and reality is not logical. Pursuing this policy might make sense in the short term, but in the long term as Nooga said, Waves is going to lose sales because studios will simply start neglecting to list Waves on their product lists to avoid such nonsense. In other words, Waves will lose their air of ‘ubiquity’, which IMHO is the only thing they have going for them anymore – personally in terms of DSP quality I think they’re severely lacking in comparison to Duende, Sonnox and others but obviously this is a subjective view.

Yep, the companies should learn to whip out their KY jelly and spread ‘em in preparation for their customer base.

It’s good to debate.

I hold strong that one cannot “fight” piracy. The point is, software is copyable for 0 cost, people know that, and people want it for free, and therefore people will get it for free. It is the same point which invalidates comparisons to “pirating” a car – an instance of a car is not free, though an instance of a song or a piece of software is most certainly.

Companies that go out of business due to piracy must be pretty out of touch with their customer base and/or simply unprepared to deal with how the software business works. Sure, they might make a good plugin, but they (obviously) can’t handle the market and the politics that go with it. Waves is an example of a company failing to keep up. They arrogantly think they can change what is unchangeable (perceptions of a community,

I come off as being “pro-pirate,” but I feel simply realistic. I pay for stuff that I care about, and that is the only point companies need to worry about. Make me care about, make me need the software, listen to me, create software for me, and you get paid no problem. Of course, for each paying customer, maybe there exists 5 unpaying customers. But it is a waste of time to sit around pretending to “do something about it” – these are not potential customers, they are simply people trying out your software because they can, or because they can’t afford the true product itself. Don’t waste your time on them, you will not get anywhere -spend your time making a great product and getting it out there to the people who have the money to spend and who value and desire it.

There are many way to develop great relations with customers, and even to lure ‘pirates’ into becoming paying customers. Providing support (a huge huge part of the software business), extras (owning the actual DVDs/Books in hand makes a difference), pride of ownership….these are valid reasons to buy instead of try.

I’m going to stick around this blog, despite having different ideals than Peter (it’s good to be different!) – this subject is extremely important to me. After all, I’m a musician in a copyright-obsessed and desperate industry. A nobody, perhaps. I don’t make a single dollar with music. But hey, I’ll never blame those evil pirates. In fact, I’ll give my music away happily, because making music is important to me.

And that is the way the world works these days. Complain, grow up, cry, fight, or simply just watch in awe, amazement, and thankfulness that we have done something as amazing as to be able to distribute wonderful creations for next to no cost or effort. Next step? Getting creative on how to keep these musicians and software writers employed!

I’m not at all convinced that the Waves crackdown does help them, though — I think, as even PACE and IMSTA argue, better education is a big part of it. And I think community is a big part of it, and I hope we can do as much as possible here on CDM and elsewhere in the Interwebs.