And above that, it's against the law, at least in the EU, where customers have the legal right to sell any purchased software with a perpetual license. The producer is legally forbidden to hinder this. A dongle is such a hindrance, which means that in case a producer chooses to use such a dongle, he is legally obliged to facilitate license transfers from one dongle to another for as long as these licenses are valid. Perpetually, that is.
That is my understanding of the current state of EU law, too. This applies irrespective of where the sample set supplier is based - if a first sale is made to an EU resident it is subject to EU law.
It is the sample set supplier's
perpetual responsibiity to ensure that new subsequent owners can continue to use the product in the same way as the first owner. If a supplier chooses to use technical means to protect any rights (and this is implicitly encouraged in EU law) they are obliged to continue to facilitate transfers to all future owners. If the technical means becomes obsolete and cannot be used by the susequent owners they must provide an alternative means of access. Free iLok accounts and dongles or a decrypted version in this case. They must also provide the same access to websites, downloads etc that the original owner would have enjoyed.
Nothing in the licence conditions can preclude this, and attempting to do so can make it an "unfair" consumer contract with legal sanctions in some countries.
Since this obligation is apparently unlimited in time or number of subsequent owners this is actually a legally rather onerous and poytentially quite expensive liability for suppliers to take on. I have never understood why sample set suppliers would voluntarily do so.
Of course
this applies to Hauptwerk itself as much as sample sets. If the dongle becomes obsolete for any reason and prevents licensed EU first-sale or subsequent owners accessing the software MDA would be legally obliged to offer alternative access to the HW4 software, for ever.
- Adrian.