Aah, that thread makes me feel like a saint (blurb, bla:D). I played with Orion 4.0 demo for a week, never had had half as much fun with a host, wrote to Wuppertal without knowing it (I thought Orion was based in the USA, he he) and was the happy owner. After doing this with all vstis I bought you end up being called "Gutmensch", which means something like "okay not sending him into jail, but at least fart in his direction once every hour"
.
Personally I think the guys over at gmedia (now gforce) put it right - some "longer testing" is nothing they recommend, but it still can be good for the business, if it is most expensive software. A student has to save a lot to buy Reaktor, for example. They, like Synapse audio, go on with the most userfriendly copy-protection ever, and what I read sounds like "the poorest of the poor might use our stuff as long as they are REALLY poor" (see below), and pay as soon as they get the first bit of money. Kind of.
Otherwise I can just backup Bones' story here - I know a rich film student who even calls himself "anti-german communist" (this is just bloated nonsense of some fashion scenes here, in reality they are rich and fly every 3rd weekend to Mallorca to have the 26th holiday in a year). He uses only stolen software, and the best one for his films. He often came to me and said I was crazy to BUY all that stuff, not even making money with music. No denying, it's the general rule, and it sometimes gets philosophical blurb too like in Germany from the "Zuendfunk" of the bavarian radio. They call it "postmodernitiy and inauthenticity" - meaning loosely after some ridiculous Foucault- or Deleuze- quotes that everyone could steal everything (but you CAN get into trouble if you quote their radio show in a blog, he he he he
).
Apart from that - Urs from u-he has something that sounds a bit like what Rich had in old Orion versions - Zebra2 shrinks away before your eyes he wrote at KVR if you open a cracked copy. That would be a great thing, nobody could really think about it being a bug^^ - and we would have our lovely userfriendly serial-protected Orion for as long as new versions will come out.
Concerning Moby - he praises Cubase to everyone not up the tree at three, as I read very often. He really loves it, it seems. I doubt if that leads to more SOLD copies of Cubase. I often heard people say after they heard him - hey I gotta get a copy. It's just something that really changed, and as everyone answers such a sentence with "oooh the old times were-a better, wot?" it gets drowned that - in this respect, yes, less people did steal. The first hackers, a Heidelberg student told me (he had all cracked versions of whatnot from Radium and Oxygen others) really did it to prove you could hack, or out of some idea to do "something good for the masses". As far as I know they even were after people who tried to sell their stuff...
It's really like Dungeon Studio says concerning guitars - my Greg Bennett ones sound great, just like Yamaha Pacificas or others - still people show Fender Gibson and Ibanez only. So the way out would be someone of us gets famous and shouts out ORION! or GREG BENNETT SAMICK GUITARS!! Errm....
