Ableton Forum

What do you do if you find out someone has a crack of Live?

Personally I don't bat an eyelash when some one has a crack of dreamweaver or logic (both of which I paid a lot for,) etc, but Live is really different in my opinion.

I just chewed off someones head about this.

I'm really pissed off to know that there are supposedly cracked versions of Live going around. I'm very mad.

This is why I don't bitch about paying for upgrades or operator. I use this shit like a life-support glucose drip.

Next trustfund DIY kid I meet with a crack of this...

i hear ya - i was given a copy, and within a few days i "knew" i had to give back to Ableton for this gift i was given. the money was not in my budget, but i did not have a "choice". Ableton is my friend, my companion, my energetic grounding.

I wish there was some sort of way of inding out where these copies are coming from and anonymously helping to inform ableton about it. It just pisses me off to think that the next person I take time to help might not be contrinuting their share to the development of this product.

I have already completely severed the chances of collaborating with one person because they told me they were waiting for a cracked version. I wanted to punch him in the face, but instead I said "just don't tell me if you do", and proceded to show him how to use his new copy of Logic.

GGGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It depends if they really have the money or not. If they are one broke ass mother fucker with a 6 year old computer taking the bus to work everyday, and they have alot of creativity, but no way to develope it, then ya, i dont give a fuck.

The general way I think about all cracked software, music, movies, etc, is if you dont have the money and are not going to buy it if you cant find a cracked copy, then fuck it, you are not robbing anyone. Unfortunetly, alot of people start out this way and just continue to do it later in life even when they get the money, cause they are cheap.

p.s., i paid for my copy.

LOFA wrote:
I'm really pissed off to know that there are supposedly cracked versions of Live going around. I'm very mad.

...

i saw a crack of live 5 the day it was released .the same when live 4 came out .
what i have heard from the users of these cracks is that they work only for a certain time .they keep on crashing & after a few month you can't even open it .
to be honest i need so much live to be stable that i wont gamble on instaling a crack on my pc .

those crackers have been around for a very lond time ,there must be no more than 10 ,everyone knows their pseudo , why they haven't been caught yet ?
may be it's because they are very good at what they do .

...

this is an old topic ... basically - u will never stop the hackers+crackers. Most producers I know hardly pay for any of their software. The sheer availability of cracked software on p2p networks makes it very easy. No matter what schemes software companies come up with they will always get cracked.

What makes a difference is when companies produce quality software for a decent price AND support their customers, like Ableton (although I feel they are starting to slip a little, with all the bugs present in L5...)

(BTW I am a proud owner of Live since v3)

Oh come on now... you cannot justify that is okay to pirate software from one company and not another. That is just being silly.

I completely admit that I got into music creation only because of software piracy. I had always grown up figuring that music was too hard and that it would be impossible for me to learn to play any instruments. I never would have bought a sequencer or tried out a program (or purchased my first loop library... ugh) without having been given a pirated copy of acid.

At that time I was too uninformed to even know which way was up, and which way was down... but from playing around I got interested and bought the software, bought a lot of books and a triton studio. Even a year after I still would play around with pirated soft synths because I had no clue how to create patches very well and still couldn't play a keyboard to save my life.

Now I have better things to do than download pirated synths or sequencers and learn how to use them... I spend plenty of time researching (well usually) before I buy and I can generally make informed decisions. The problem with demo versions of software is that you cannot fully live with them to get a concise grasp of how the entire package works. Granted at this point I have enough savvy to fill in the blanks and I do try out demos... but when I was getting started it was much different.

If anything I now own too much software and probably need to do some purging... unfortunately there are some synths I don't use very often (like x-phraze and stylus rmx) that when I load it up I keep wondering how I create anything without them.

Anyway... instead of cutting ties with the dude... unless he was that awful to work with to begin with... you probably could've shown him some chops and possibly convinced him to buy a copy. Then again I do know how some people are about bragging about how they didn't pay for something and you are a chump, so I guess it depends on the situation...

stealing makes white kids feel bad-ass. just like listening to hip hop.

ultrasource wrote:stealing makes white kids feel bad-ass. just like listening to hip hop.

And I always thought it was because they wanted to be able to wear an eye patch

I get really pissed off when someone antagonizes me for paying for software, yet I make a point of keeping my professional life clean. I feel that the extra work I put into something to pay for it, will somehow complement my work ethic while using it. It's perhaps my own superstition that by assuming a profeesional attitude I will more likely be able to assume a professional stauts in a closer future.

I am of course a hypocrite, as I don't feel this obligation with large companies, but as soon as my interest goes beyond tinkering I buy. The new Adobe CS is gonna be a bitch, but come fall, I will need to use intensively for school. I don't feel any moral obligation to some of these larger companies, especially as their products are overpriced so that businesses/schools compensate for all of the cracks, but I pay for their software simply to watch my own ass.

I sometimes wish that I didn't pay for logic (as apples support is aprehensable), but having done so, I have made the effort to approach it in a professional manner.

I too hope that support after 5 dosen't become support A.5..

I sell music software for a living and it's tricky. I pitch all sorts of software to all sorts of people and do lots of demos... and with Ableton being my personal favorite, I often gravitate toward pitching and demoing it.

When you pitch a software to someone and they get into it and actually buy it, it's a rush. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but keep in mind that I commit 50+ hours a week solely to sifting through straws of hay.

I can only imagine how many people I've pitched a piece of software to that went straight home and stole it. People always get excited about the demos I do, but such a slim percentage of them actually pay for software.

As much as I think Linux + open source software is a good idea and exciting... Ableton is the perfect example of the opposite sort of business model, a software company that sells its wares to a happy and supportive customer base.

It upsets me that people steal the crap, but it also makes a large portion of the population who would otherwise never use or even consider paying for the product completely addicted to it. Then the percentage of that portion of the population that has a conscience or half an ounce of self respect will come around and become a paying customer at some point.

I personally don't care, and I think that it's a good thing (TM). Think about it this way; piracy is another way of saying "any news is good news". It helps gets out the name of a product and boosts the overall userbase. The more users you have, the greater percentage there are that are going to buy it.

Piracy isn't a big evil "thief", as the RIAA/MPAA want you to think. It's a black market force, and companies with a product to sell are essentially competing not only against other companies, but against this black market as well. Smart companies are those who market their products well and make it easier to buy than pirate. When that price point is optimal, the effects of the black market are minimalized.
However, in other cases outright piracy can be used as a powerful force for expanding a company's name. Consider the case of Macromedia. When the dreamweaver suite first came out, it was ridiculously easy to crack. Hell, you could download a fully-functional 30-day demo from the website, 10 seconds later on google, and you'd have a key to make it a 100% professional version. Macromedia no doubt lost a lot of "business" to this, but consider that most of the people pirating this software didn't have the money to pay for it anyways. They're damn 14 year old kids. However, these kids got a free education with the software, and when they went into the workforce armed with the preference and knowledge of how to use it, it would help to net Macromedia big sales on the corporate level. I personally contributed to this effect on a few separate occaisions, as it was what I would recommend when my managers asked for a good web-development suite. This piracy also helped them to establish a large and faithful userbase when they were just starting out in a fiercely competitive market against Microsoft and Adobe. And now look at them, they've been bought out, which is every startup's dream come true.

I think that this is especially the music production industry, where it is very common for people to start out using pirated gear/demos, but eventually pay for products that they support. Looking at the number of "and for the record, I paid for my copy" posts in this thread (and which, for the record, I paid for a full version of live4 and the 5 upgrade ).

The fact is that it's always going to happen, and very few companies have been able to effectively prevent it. Those that do are using hardware keys and other ridiculous measures, and if you'll notice, these products are not very widespread. For the rest of them, it's just a fact of life, no matter how many hoops you make the user jump through (ever bought any software from NI, for instance). If the music and movie industry learned that they could actually use piracy to their advantage and re-shape their business model around it, they'd be raking in cash hand over fist instead of having to go to their investors with their tail inbetween their legs. How many more CD's would you be buying per year if they only cost 3-5$ each instead of the 18$ with the RIAA "tax"?

I have run into this as well.

A good friend of mine - a very talented breaks producer and DJ - got a krak of Live 4. I have been an OWNER since v.1, so I was the one pushing him to get Live. He was frustrated with Logic - costs too much, dongle-dependant, too complicated, memory hog, etc., but felt that since all his favorite breaks producers all used Logic, so should he. I showed him Live 3 (about a month before 4 came out) and he was interested. Mainly for sketching and ReWire work. Live 4 drops a bit later and he has a krak within a week. Now, being broke, I understand his plight - he ponied all his savings for Logic, and it sucked the creativity out of him. He hit a wall and couldn't get inspirerd, until he tried Live.

After about a month of gentle prodding - noting the low cost, quick and cheap upgrades, ease of use, sound quality, etc. - he paid for 4 (and since got the upgrade to 5). Its just a matter of time. The software is so good as to win folks over and they realize that supporting a good thing and getting the stability from legal software (especially Live), is reason enough to pay up - even if they don't "have to".

I have seen other software companies' stuff kraked, but they NEVER elicit the response that Ableton does... "This program is SO good, I have to buy it."

Not Logic, Cubase, Reason, FL Studio, Acid. Nothing.

You know the software is good if it turns the corrupt into the conscientious.

P2P sites and those who crack software are part of a systematic plan to entice more and more people into the world wide web. Thats fact. Free music, free movies, free software and on and on.
This is why there hasn't been a full stop to any of it. Think about it, if piracy is REALLY an issue, those concerned would have put a stop immediately to those P2P sites and groups like Paradox and anyone else responsible. They haven't because the issue goes into a deeper control level where those who are fully in charge (you guess who "They" are) want people to willingly jump into the internet web where the ultimate plan is ALL commerce and information will be readily available (and tracked) through ONE source...the WWW.

Cracked ANYTHING will be around for a while until the internet has drawn the whole population into its web.