10 dollars says that Timo didn’t read your question the way you intended it.
Your argument is similar to the one about illegally shared music: “Well, if I couldn’t have gotten this music without paying I wouldn’t have gotten it at all” in a nutshell.
Here’s the thing:
When I walked into studios in the beginning of this century the computers were filled with cracked software. Even professional studios were. People didn’t even lift an eyebrow it seems. You’d open an insert slot to insert a plugin and you got a list so long it would have taken a roll of toilet paper to fit it all.
And then more and more shifted to iLok for example and I saw fewer and fewer studios using cracked software. More and more switching over. More stable systems, more quality plugins. Less “noise” if you will.
The thing is that we could “get away with it” in our industry, but in other “professional” fields you can’t. You can’t use cracked software in banking, health care, retail etc. It’s just not feasible. And so you have to look at what the most reasonable reaction to all the ‘theft’ was in our industry, and it really seems it was using a dongle. In other industries there were other means of keeping things kosher, things that had to do with the industries themselves. And we didn’t have as much, quick internet access back then as we do now (which reminds me that a lot of people are complaining about keeping computers online, so there’s that too regarding license authorizations). So that’s why I think the comparison isn’t really that great.
But yeah, these days some do it differently and skip the dongle and use other types of authorization.
Here’s the thing though:
“I can safely say that the current system won’t stay forever…”
I know I’m whining about whining… but they’ve heard you loud and clear, many times… moveondotorg?