I've heard that the NSA has developed a VST plugin to track the pirates that when you render the audio it inserts farts randomly in the mixdown, it connects to an NSA server to send your logs and fills your Hard Disk with granny diaper porn.

Be careful mates.

Spoiler

Sorry dudes today I have a humorous mood

 

It could be easy to notice watermarking in exported audio just by looking at the spectrum. I've been working with Waves a lot too since v9 came out and I haven't found any watermark of some sort.

 

although audio watermarking exists, it's absolutely not relevant here!

Audio watermarking is made for final media, like mp3 or such. There's some kinda information embedded which helps to find out who bought the mp3. If you buy such a watermarked music file and distribute it via P2P or whatever, the music company has an indication WHO really did that, but audio watermarking wasn't really used. Video watermarking was more common. You remember the "screener" video releases some years ago? They were released as (s)vcds just before the cinema release of the movie.
That's why the companies are starting to watermark each (!) screener they gave to the press. And there were journalists tracked down, because they forwarded the screener to release groups!

Anyway, back to vsts now:
Watermarks in vsts are real, but has nothing to do with audio watermarking. IF there's kinda watermark in the vst, it's within the .dll / .vst / .au file but *not* in the audio output - that's an urban legend!
The watermark is there to prevent you from giving YOUR copy to the public. If you'd do so without changing anything, it's possible to track YOU down. That's why release groups needs at least 2 copys of a software to find the watermark and set it to something void.

Stop thinking about the software you're using and just make music!

 

And to add (was said before): They can do nothing even if your name is on a software spreaded - what if someone broke into my computer/dropbox/onedrive etc. and stole it? What if someone counterfeited a watermark to harm my music? If you would responsible for that, no one would buy software any more.

There's also warez spreaded with real user serials (I think e.g. from Tone2 or Spire serials from Youtube) - do you really think Tone2/Spire can sue the poor guys who's serial was pulled?

 

well, sometimes …

 

As I told you before, that's about intentionally audio watermarking for the final media (== mp3). That has NOTHING to do with watermarking of software!

 

Yes obviously. But in the meantime, I don't see why it won't give the ability to some software companies to implement this to their software. We'll see …