Sorry that my first post here is a gripe, but our honeymoon is officially at an end.

I hate iLok. Just say no.

I realize you have to protect the investment you have in developing your products, but iLok is just a monumentally bad idea.

Why? Because iLok protects YOU, and it does absolutely nothing for your customers, yet WE have to PAY $40 for it, so YOU can sleep better at night.

I'm not against protection schemes, but I am against this one, and I don't buy products that require it.

I suggest you look into the scheme used by, say MOTU for Digital Performer, where you have to load your installer disk to authorize a machine.

I wouldn't even mind if you added $40 to the cost of your plugs to offset the losses from theft. I'd rather pay that to you than to the iLok company.

Otherwise, I'm delighted with the VW and MixPack that I bought/licensed. I've heartily recommended them for their value, their a la carté pricing, and their lack of a dongle requirement.

But, like I said... the honeymoon's over.

Well Jim,

I agree with you that the dongle is not the best option.

But your MOTU argument is a bit tricky - as M5, MX4, MSI and the new Ethno all require dongles (and exactly the same one). no one knows about DP5 yet (although unlikely).

I personally think paying $40 for a dongle once (or twice) is a better deal than adding $40 for each plugin. And compared to the pricings of other companies (Wwwww....) this is still damn good deal for the money.

I think it is their right to be able to sleep better at night - we benefit form this with more great plugs :-) - I also like to be able to sleep well at night, so I think this should be ok.

If you have VW you even get a disount which makes of the dongle easily, no? Which other developer is offering that (besides EA)?

It (the dongly thingy) is not the best thing, but it could be worse :-)

best

You do know that if you already own an iLok dongle, you can add the authorization for your PSP plug for no extra charge. On one of my iLok dongles I have stuff from AntaresTech, MOTU and PSP. It's pretty cool and like I said, if you already own one, free. If not, not a bad price to pay for security.

Security? In what sense?

That's my point. The dongle doesn't do anything for me. It protects the vendor. If the vendors want to throw it in for free (rebate?) and make it's operation totally painless and transparent to the customer, then I might reconsider.

The dongle protects the vendors but it also protects us from not being able to use the software at some point in the future because a vendor went out of business.

It's a drag but the people to blame are the folks who steal software.

>>
but it also protects us from not being able to use the software at some point in the future because a vendor went out of business.
>>

Which might be half true for sellers like WUPped Waved, or something but definitely not for the protection theme PSP had. THe propability that the plugin gets broken by a OS or Sequencer update is quite high in my opinion (but them I am a Mac user with Apple making one change after the other).

But:
>>
The dongle doesn't do anything for me.
>>
It allows you to use the plugin, if that is nothing for you, well, then you might not have a problem anyways. It is that simple.

>>
If the vendors want to throw it in for free (rebate?) and make it's operation totally painless and transparent
>>
This would clearly mean that the developer also had to develop the dongle and copy protection theme by himself - I think this not neither realistic nor reasonable.
A rebate? Hmmm, I do not see you problem. The plugin is offert with and clearly states that it costs that without a dongle. PSP could also do it that way: compared to another plug of that quality form another vendor (if there is any) you pay one third, so you might purchase about xx dongle for the difference in price. I think at this point your demand gets somehow unreasonable, really.

best

the people who are to blame are the people who develop software who force iLok upon us... not the people who steal it [who bypass the dongle anyway with emulation]

i dont see how it will protect anyone once the vendor goes out of business considering plugins have been becoming obsolete within a few versions anymore with the advancements [wrong word, changes] in the OS they run under.

iLok is just another form of the paranoia that seems to run deep through this country and world at the moment. nobody trusts anybody, and it shows how much the companies trust their [legitimate] clientbase, punish them with iLok while the thieves run rampant with kracks anyway. kinda makes you want to be a thief over a legitimate customer. treat me like a thief and i will act like a thief...

of course, i buy no software that uses iLok and will boycott that company [pace/iLok] until they no longer exist.... and i urge any software developer who thinks of using them as "protection" not to do so or they too lose me as a customer... psp has already lost sales from me from their new association with the company... fortunately the plugins i love from them are still non-iLok products.

alphajerk - are you US-american?

Do not blame the thief but the company that makes the product - sure!
Besides that, you are insulting people here ("you poor mac bastards" quote from another post of you) so maybe you first learn how to behave in society before posting publicly - I would appreciate it!
I have seen to many people who earn much more than some software developers that use cracked software and make money with that.

best

In my opinion all kinds of copy protection are annoying for legitimate users.
The world is not perfect. Majority of us have to use keys to start the car, close all windows and doors before we go to sleep, even some of people need personal bodyguards (and they don't do it just for fun; it is really annoying system). All this security tricks are very annoying.
Honey, do you know where I put keys from our car?
Honey, please close window upstairs before we will leave.
What was the PIN number for my CreditCard?
and so on...
In perfect world none software developer would protect his software but the world is no perfect so we have to implement copy protection.
Main point of using copy protection is protect vendor I agree but it is also protection for legitimate users.
Majority of our customers run their own business. They have to calculate costs and revenues of their business. They have to be competitive on the market. One source of competitive advantage is what tools they have available in their studios. If anyone can have exactly the same tools for 'free' it is impossible to be completive and it is very frustrating
That is why in my opinion vendor and user are on the same boat.
Why did we choose iLok?
It seems that it is currently the most effective system. (effective in terms it is no so easy to crack as other systems)
It is in my opinion the most convenient copy protection system (possibility of storage authorization for different products from different vendors on one key; cross platform; system)
It seems that more and more (and I hope it will be more) companies from pro audio are using that system which make it very universal tool (in almost perfect.world all wendors would use the smae sysem but the world is no perfect.

Antoni Ozynski