Is it not more "VST author just does the bare minimum to keep honest people honest, because more invasive DRM risks ruining a live performance"? I'm not understanding why TFA author has such an attitude about this. Is the VST author a horrible person or running a toxic business model or something?
I think the VST author and the DRM vendor are different people and the author is poking fun at the latter. It’s possible that the VST author isn’t aware that the fancy DRM protection they paid for doesn’t cover runtime.
And I'm glad they didn't. Protecting the installer keeps honest people honest. Protecting the runtime after installed means reduced performance and/or support headaches. That said I hope the developer didn't pay too much for this copy protection when some bespoke checks on the installer would have sufficed.
I'm just glad they didn't use iLok. It's been a pain for me as a legitimate user of a few iLok protected plugins.
Runtime checks aren't an impossible effort to defeat either. If you're into this stuff, you should build a plugin with them yourself and then figure out how to crack it. It's a great learning exercise.
As another commenter wrote, the protection is there to keep honest people honest, like locking the front door of your house.
It's not foolproof and doesn't need to be. It's role is to make sure respectful users know that you'd genuinely prefer they not steal your stuff (not everyone actually does care about that).
Question: Why go through the effort of removing most of the key throughout the article just to have it in a chunk of code in the article anyways? I'm not trying to throw shade here, I am legitimately curious about the reasoning
You can't possibly know that by the mere lack of these DLLs from the import directory.
I'm just glad they didn't use iLok. It's been a pain for me as a legitimate user of a few iLok protected plugins.
As another commenter wrote, the protection is there to keep honest people honest, like locking the front door of your house.
It's not foolproof and doesn't need to be. It's role is to make sure respectful users know that you'd genuinely prefer they not steal your stuff (not everyone actually does care about that).