How do you feel about Autodesks recent decisions?

majic12 · Jul 2019

I know many of you have seen that Autodesk is trying to kill the existing perpetual licenses by not providing activation codes and linking a perpetual to the X life of your workstation>converting a perpetual license in to a limited time one now.There are quite a few angry threads on their forums but no news for a fix to the situation.

Some of you are in the big companies and have perpetuals all over the place.Any insider of a upcoming lawsuit decisions?

I my self already got in contact with my lawyer who is still investigating the issue.In his words, this should be easy, but the problem is that is hard because they are so big.

zachagreg · Jul 2019

I think they are trying to remedy a massive headache for themselves as well as certain types of companies or companies within certain sectors which use their products. From personal experience I know that we have a huge library of legacy MAX files sitting on our server from 2013 3ds max. Most of these are never used or used in fringe cases. However for some reason because we have these, rather than update those files they have the employees on that project use Max 2013.

They do this for the reasoning, I assume, that they have paid for the licenses. I could be wrong I don't know the licensing history on that. However, by using this Autodesk is required to give a certain level of support on these versions that are 6 years old. There is some associated overhead on a company level with providing such support for several versions back some more than a decade. I personally don't mind the decision. However on a corporate level I understand the inherent outcry because a perpetual is a perpetual you don't just get to suddenly decide that it is no longer valid. Stop support for them fine or list them as legacy but stopping license terms for the perpetual doesn't seem legal to me.

majic12 · Jul 2019

If people here feel that are affected by this movement, here is one of the threads where others demand for a offline activation option after the date limit placed by Autodesk, which is 2021.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/previous-version-support/can-i-obtain-offline-activation-in-the-future/td-p/8936373

Feel free to join in.

Hope it helps.

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel · Jul 2019

Weather changes. Animals grumble. Weather changes. They forget.

Ryusaki · Jul 2019

EU citizen can use a crack to circumvent DRM if Autodesk isn't providing license activation and still be on the good side of the law. That's my superficial observation of the situation. IANAL. But i think there is no way in Hell Autodesk can win a case in front of an EU Judge when it comes to having their way. Perpetual licenses are forever and binding them to the life of hardware is illegal. If there is no other way of activating a legal license, breaking the DRM becomes legal.

Also using the official and valid offline activation code might be enough to activate the license, altering the activation program (cracking) is not even necessary. You would just use an illegal activation program to activate your legal and official license.

majic12 · Aug 2019

Ryusaki said:

EU citizen can use a crack to circumvent DRM if Autodesk isn't providing license activation and still be on the good side of the law. That's my superficial observation of the situation. IANAL. But i think there is no way in Hell Autodesk can win a case in front of an EU Judge when it comes to having their way. Perpetual licenses are forever and binding them to the life of hardware is illegal. If there is no other way of activating a legal license, breaking the DRM becomes legal.
Also using the official and valid offline activation code might be enough to activate the license, altering the activation program (cracking) is not even necessary. You would just use an illegal activation program to activate your legal and official license.

Actually i saw the same statement in another place, so it does look like a alternative.Still it loud be fun to get that audit letter after by Autodesk saying, ''hey, we noticed that somehow your license just jumped from one pc to another,can we take a look?'' To which I think one can decline and threaten with a lawsuit for them not providing support or something.

How do you feel about Autodesks recent decisions?

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