Meaningless Rant

I can’t see that working in schools, even on staff-only computers. Here in the U.K. I have colleagues who are prohibited from entering the classroom with a mobile phone. It’s to do with safeguarding and privacy…

Or we could just not be subjected to the Spanish Software Inquisition. Not like it actually stops the pirates, anyway. It literally only harms actual paying customers.

Im not defending the current licensing system… but I think it does, in fact, do a pretty good job of preventing piracy.

I’m sure Daniel contributed to an earlier discussion that that version of Cubase had not beed broken at all. It may have been someone else. If it’s that effective then it is genuinely reducing the cost to us. (Nevertheless, I hate dongles and the usb hub required to have them all in at once.)

You cannot find the current version of Dorico (or indeed any version beyond version 1.0.20) on crack sites, so for all of its faults, the eLicenser system does at least prevent casual (and possibly not-so-casual) piracy.

Interesting! Here in the U.S., at the university where I teach, I can only access online materials in the classroom if I do have my phone - I need my log-in, and the phone for the second layer of identification. My only reason for suggesting it is that of all the things we might lose/leave behind, our phones are the least likely to go missing. Or, our glasses - can we get a dongle on those? :stuck_out_tongue:

Ah! Well at conservatoire level I have the same issue. I’m currently forced to do two-step verification on two Outlook accounts (on my HOME computers) weekly, and it’s driving me up the wall. In schools (where under-18s are educated) you sometimes see mobile phones banned, particularly in Primary-Year 6 (4-11 year olds).

And insofar as the copy-protection on Cubase, etc. allowed Steinberg to build up the funds to invest in the development of Dorico from scratch with topnotch programmers, I am all for a licensing scheme that minimizes piracy.

See also this article from only last week on the very real dangers of downloading audio apps and plugins from crack sites: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2019/06/20/loudminer-mining-cracked-vst-software/ (TL;DR - cracked plugins actually containing cryptocurrency miners on Windows and Mac)

In the olden days myself and other beta testers of an unnamed engraving program were testing on cracked versions, because the copy protection system was writing to somewhere low-level on the drives and basically buggering them up. The company knew that we were doing this, but were in a contract with the copy protection company.
So I hate jumping through hoops to use things I’ve paid for, but like Derrek, I’m happy to put up with it if it is genuinely stopping people sharing Dorico for free.
Paul, I wouldn’t bother sharing that info…I don’t have any sympathy for people that nick software, especially professional tools.