IP Copy Protection
25 messages in this thread
Ben:
I have a Ham-E unit and use ImagePro with it. The new copy protection
scheme is driving me nuts as I use IP with a series of REXX EXEC's. They
used to run by themselves but now I have to babysit them and keep typing in
the password.
Is there anyway I can get IP without the copy protection. Currently I
download the latest version from CIS but I would be willing to sign up for
the automatic upgrade program you have if it mean't that I would be getting
a non-copy protected version.
Is this the way it works?
Thanks,
Martin. -=Martin=-
– via Whap!
There is no way to get a version of IP that is not entry protected. No
such thing exists.
Why not start Imagemaster once, and leave it running? That would solve the
problem.
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Ben:
The problem is that I use both IP and ADPro. I find that both products have
their strengths. My ARexx macros use both products. There is no way I can
just start IP and leave it running because then I have no memory left to
start ADPro. My current set of macros run one product, create a temporary
file, close it, start the other product which reads in the temporary file
etc. I can no longer run these macros without baby sitting them and
constantly entering the password.
I really wish your company would reconsider this policy. I can understand
why the version of IP distributed via CIS is copy protected but not the one
available by your mail in upgrade plan. You are no more exposed to IP
piracy than you are for ImageMaster, yet one product is copy protected and
one isn't. I would certainly be willing to pay the extra for a usable,
non-copy protected version of IP.
The rest of the world is moving away from copy protection, you are adding
it. I long ago made the decision never to buy copy protected software. I
always ask before I buy. It never even occured to me that a company would
sneak in copy protection in an upgrade. I have spent a lot of time, effort
and money on IP and all that now appears to be wasted. You are not
preventing theft of your product just turning at least one formerly very
satisified customer into someone who is very close to deciding that he will
never deal with BlackBelt Systems again.
Please reconsider!
Thank you,
-=Martin=-
– via Whap!
Quite the contrary – we ARE preventing theft of it, and we will not
reconsider at this time. If we lose you as a customer, I'm terribly sorry,
but it's a small hit compared to the damage we were taking when anyone
could use IP as a processing engine for free.
The reason that we don't distribute 2 (or three etc) versions of IP is
because of the usual business factor: cost. It is absolutely imperitive
that we keep the distribution cost of IP down, and make d*mn certain that
it's availability does not impact on Imagemaster sales, which is what keep
us in business, not incidentally able to MAKE upgrades to IP, btw.
We are NOT moving towards copy protection on normally distributed
software. Imagemaster is unprotected; NoteBook is unprotected; PackeTerm
is unprotected; Board Master is unprotected; the AVT software is
unprotected. Further, IP is not protected in the same sense as normal copy
protection is meant. It requires no manual, no uncopyable disk, no rotary
key card, no memorization – in short, it's an ingenious solution to a very
serious problem – theft – which is VERY serious to us. Bottom line, IP is
NOT copy protected; it is theft protected. It will work on your system,
albeit with some "babysitting" (since you have a limited memory situation)
and if you expand your environment, you won't have any problems with the
locked entry system at all – as you mention yourself. What you want us to
do is make an exception for you, when what should be happening is that you
need to buy more memory, imho.
The vast majority of IP users have NO problem with the lock. IP is
maintained as a courtesy; we could have easily, and with considerable
justification, stopped providing ANY upgrades to it and made Imagemaster
(and the associated crossgrade fee, $125) the only solution to those who
need what is in the software. I find myself not in sympathy your position
at all, I'm afraid.
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Ben:
I will try and keep this note calm but it will be hard because I am mad. I
am trying to be reasonable about this. I am willing to pay for a non-copy
protected version of IP, I would even seriously consider buying ImageMaster
if it supported my Ham-E unit, but as I understand it, it does not. So
there is apparently no way I can get non copy protected software from BBS
from my Ham-E right? It seems that the only company willing to offer Ham-E
support without copy protection is ASDG Inc.
My system is a 3000, with 10M. I don't consider this a minimal system. Yet
not surprisingly it is not capable of running IP and ADPro at the same
time. The result is I have to stop and start IP.
You say you are not planning to introduce copy protection on your other
products. When I purchased my Ham-E directly from BBS, I was told there was
no copy protection. There is now. You lied once, I would be a jerk to fall
for this again so I will not consider doing business with your company in
the future.
Copy protection is simply unacceptable for a professional product. I have
argued this with other companies in the past, Disney for example. I have
yet to win. But I remain committed to no copy protected software on my
machine. It is very unfortunate that Amiga developers see fit to resort to
copy protection. This only contributes to the machine's undeserved
reputation as a toy computer. It hurts the entire Amiga community, not just
individual users.
I once saw you're company referred to as "software with an attitude", it
seems very appropriate at this point.
-=Martin=-
– via Whap!
Ok.
First, Imagemaster offers far more extensive, and higher quality, support
of the HAM-E unit than AdPro does, which is all ASDG has to offer at this
time. Not surprising, since we invented 8-bit HAM techniques. Image
Professional, which is the ultimate support for the HAM-E, is not
available without the gate. Period. As for you paying for a non-gate IP,
we estimate development costs at about $200/hour, including all overhead;
losses due to theft are not something you can calculate until after they
happen, even then you're WAY on the conservative side when you count only
known occurances. I rather doubt you could or would be willing to afford
such an effort, it would be well into four figures.
A 10m system IS a minimal system for what you're trying to do, in my
opinion; I use a 30+ MB system and consider that adequate, not excessive,
for the type of operations you're after; my opinion only, but based on a
lot of experience with gfx ops. Plus, AdPro is absolutely terrible at
memory management; it's a hog, plain and simple, with no real tiem
allocation capabilities so you have to muck about with it's icon or some
such thing to get it squared away about what it is "allowed" to have. This
was a design decision by ASDG, and good or bad, the effect it has on YOU
is making your system fit the definition of a minimum one. Imagemaster
will return ALL it's image memory when you kill all the images it's
holding, and likewise Image Pro. It's NOT your bottleneck. Your bottleneck
is RAM, period. In my opinion.
No one lied. There is no copy protection. Copy the software all you want.
It can be copied, it just can't be stolen (copied and used away from a
HAM-E). No one is lying; you're just being hysterical. It would do you
VERY well to keep in mind that the HAM-E is a long-ago discontinued
product, not a current one, and that we have EVERY right to do whatever we
want with the software support. Very few customers act as you are now,
<continued>
which is lucky for you, because if we had to deal with this kind of acting
out, we'd just can the thing.
As for attitude, for some reason you seem to think you can come in here,
make statements about what we must do or lose you forever (a terrorist
technique, and not one we'd EVER respond to) and somehow get us to knuckle
under and expose the company to resumed _proven_ losses for a convenience
you can solve by expanding your system (which will benefit you in many
ways, just incidentally); I think the attitude is on the other foot –
yours. I'm telling you, honestly, that we are NOT going to remove the
gate, and all the rationalization, hysteria, and rightous preaching about
imaginary copy protection you can come up with won't have any effect upon
that decision.
If you don't like it, don't use it. WE are the producers of the software,
not you, and WE will make the decisions based upon ALL the factors we know
of, which we believe affect those decisions. In this case, we beleive that
the gate is required, and I also further believe that your particular
problem is not as severe as you make it out to be – to put it mildly.
Now, you've taken a lot of my time with this, and although I've been
willing to go into it this far, I'm losing patience with this rather
quickly. You've gone out on a limb; now either back off and quit trying to
terrorize us into action and work on another solution, or make good on
your threat and go away; I'd consider that unfortunate, but not the end of
the world by any means.
Finally, remember that we produce software for a broad user base; we take
_suggestions_ but nowhere have we ever allowed that to be misconstrued as
"we take orders".
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Perhaps Martin wasn't around when you origionally explained why BBS
started using the Ham-E "dongle." At the time, I was wondering why you
made IP so avalible when it did all that IM does and more. Maybe he
doesn't know about the calls BBS received from pirates because IP was
"broken." As far as copy protection goes I'm on Martin's side. I don't
think anyone hates it worse than I do, however, after reading your
explaination, I understood your reasoning. (One of my "favorite" forms of
CP was on "Who, What, When, Where." Occassionally, you would have to look
up a word in the manual but if you wanted no copy protection you had to
send Blue Ribbon a check for $10 and your credit card number with
experation date. Your name, address, and CC number was embedded in the
program so that if you put the program on a bulletin board you are litterly
passing out your credit card number to unscruplious people! I just look up
the word but rarely use the program.)
I think the issue is quite clear – IP is usable without a HAM-E as a VERY
powerful gfx processor. because it's available on BBS's all around the
country, telecomm in general, we're put in the rather strange position of
having distributed something which could, if generally usable, literally
destroy our marketplace.
Our solution was to make it unusable without a HAM-E attached; there is no
manual lookup, no codewheel, no CP at all. Just a password you enter IF
you can see it, which requires a HAM-E be attached.
That's the situation as it stands, and so it shall remain.
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Oh, I agree with you on this. I generally don't like copy protection
but after hearing you state your case I have to agree with the way you have
handled IP. IP was written to support a certain piece of hardware and I
have no problem with that.
I would think that HAM-E users would be greatful for your efforts
maintaining two parallel programs. If it were me I'd just give HAM-E users
a GOOD deal on moving from IP to IM, and then move on with IM.
-Paul-
99.99% of them are very pleasant about it, we've had two people (of which
one you just saw) actually say it was a problem for them.
We'll likely do something just as you suggest; IP will not be maintained
forever, but we will NOT leave all those people out in the cold.
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Personally, I thought this was a great solution. Got a lot of people to
"come out of the closet" when IP "broke" too. :*)
Steve
On that, I can _promise_ you're quite right. :^)
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Ben,
Just to put my $.02 in…I think that the IP protection scheme is very
fair…no one is complaining about NewTek essentially doing the same thing.
Additionally, in a way, Digital Creations is also doing the same thing…
By the way, have you seen the new DCTV RGB adapter/converter? A friend
of mine just got one…be interested to hear your thoughts.
A pleased BBS customer,
Jonathan Hirschman
– via Whap!
I have not seen the DCTV RGB converter, no. I'd like to, out of curiosity;
I expect that I will come the September WOA show.
I have one thought – at $500 for DCTV, and $300 for the converter, it
seems to me that if I were a "regular" DCTV customer (I do own one,
but…) I'd expect quite a bit for my $$$. Be interesting to see what it
provides.
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Ben,
Just to give you a preview:
It plugs into the DCTV passthru socket; your monitor connect to this. It
does not attach to the composite port (although it is most certainly some
sort of Composite <—> RGB converter.
My friend has hooked up his SuperGen to it, and the composite out is
amazing! Additionally, there is a genlock feature that allows one to make
a range of colors transparent, for overlays. A very nice touch.
The RGB quality is certainly better than the composite, but it still
shows chroma noise. You effectively get another screen mode for your
Amiga; this hookup will be great for multimedia apps, kiosk stuff and the
like. Yeah, I know that we had this "extra screen mode" with the HAM-E,
but us DCTV users have been getting pretty used to constantly pushing the
RGB/CVBS switch on our monitors for some time 🙂
Jonathan
– via Whap!
No, people do complain that the Toaster is a $2400 dongle for LightWave.
Or CG, or whatever part they like best.
John,
Guess you are right…I have been know to grouse over the fact that I
cannot buy LightWave unbundled.
Jonathan
– via Whap!
Gee, Ben, I wish I could say exactly that to some customers, but I would
get my butt in a sling.
-Jerry Thompson
Ben,
Way to go. I agree with everything you say.
–JG
Martin,
From my point of view, IP is not copy protected — it is hardware
dependent.
-sja
Martin, I have not read Ben's reply, but I'm sure there will be one lurking
there when I get done commenting. First off, you say that you are not
capable of running ADPro and IP at the same time on your 10meg 3000. Well I
have a very similar system that you have and run both programs together all
the time, so I'm not sure what problem you are having. Second, the IP form
of copy protection is the mildest form of protection I have seen on a
program. It takes me about 2 seconds to type in the characters that appear
on the screen, not a big deal in my book. Considering that Black Belt is
kind enough to provide free upgrades for a terrific program that keeps
getting better, I think you are way out of line with your critisism.
Sometimes Ben and I don't always agree on certain subjects, but the copy
protection is the least of my worries.
John – K7KB (via Whap!)
Martin,
I may have a solution that won't require upgrading your system, or
paying Black Belt the _real_ cost of developing a gate-less version of IP.
Since we know ADPro allocates all available memory at startup, and never
gives it back, why not keep IP running and bring _ADPro_ up and down? Do
some processing in IP, save the file, flush all buffers, bring up ADPro, do
some processing, save the file, quit ADPro, tell IP to do some more
processing, ad infinitum. You only had to start IP once, and there you go.
Blaq!
Actually Blaq, ADPro doesn't have to use all of your available memory at
startup. You can set up a tool type for your ADPro icon that says:
MAXMEM=4000000
or if you you bring it up from the CLI you can also specify maxmem as:
adpro maxmem=4000000
Doing this will limit ADPro from only using 4megs of contiguous ram. All
specified on page 25 of the ADPro manual.
John – K7KB (via Whap!)