In a bass guitar tutorial video by Yossi Fine (a featured artist and content producer for Waves), a cracked copy of Steinberg’s Cubase 5.1 can clearly be seen in a directory on the studio computer.
The original video has been taken offline, but can still be seen in a cached copy of the official Waves Facebook page, and has also been re-uploaded to Youtube by another user.
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The filename can be seen in the 720p clip, but here’s an image I made to highlight it:
It’s possible I suppose. Still quite an embarrassing oversight on someone’s part, though. I just found it rather amusing considering that Waves plug-ins also use dongle-based copy protection.
I know some pro’s making big dough with their musics, station-calls, advertisement music, having ridiculous hardware (protools) setups / insurances to cover all their shit, still using a lot of wares on the side. The line between ‘don’t make money from wares’ & ‘try before buy’ is pretty thin.
If the guy has money enough to buy the expensive hardware he uses in his home recording studio, then he has probably bought the Cubase 5 License.
When you search a bit infos about the AIR team that cracked Cubase 5, you see that this team is able to work thousands of hours on a reverse engeenering project, they understand so well the code they’re cracking that they’re able to fix a few bugs in it…
Some customers complained about Dongles - and a dongle is a hardware-based protection scheme requiring for example that your plug a USB device that works like a key. Apparently it seems that sometimes, you can’t use 2 dongles on the same target platform. On some computers (hyperthreading mode), under Windows, (XP, Vista…), there’s a problem with detection of some USB devices. You update one of your dongle-protected software… and the other ones aren’t working anymore… When you plug your dongle in a new USB port, it’s not recognised anymore… when you put a dongle + a webcam on a hub, for example, it’s not recognised anymore. The first one unactivates the second one. Or there’s a problem with the OS power managment system that turns off a USB device automatically, what produces a crash on your DAW…, there are so many problems that happened that a few customers bought the license, but finally used a cracked version.
Because removing the protection code from the app, makes it faster, and more reliable.
