TL;DR Steinberg targets piracy sites having "VST" in their name claiming copyright infringement on their trademark, WIPO agrees and gets some domains transferred to Steinberg. Piracy sites respond by renaming their sites.

I kind of agree with Steinberg here, it is their trademark after all, and companies do have to protect them to keep them, but obviously this wasn't the aim here. And looking at the response it's going to do jack shit.

I edited the article slightly to highlight the essentials, whole thing here: https://torrentfreak.com/steinberg-wins-wipo-domain-dispute-against-vst-plugin-pirate-sites-210625/

 

well, how about devs? I think its stupid, more studies are needed to be able to say that anyone who uses k'd software have the money to do it, for me it goes like this: ''if you dont have a chance, how can you know?'' if i can buy, if i want, if i like, if and if ...Steiberg should invest those efforts elswere

 

That's as silly as it is f'd up..

And shows some double standards..
In one side they have allowed/made their VST framework become the de facto industry standard,
and that's thanks to its ready accessibility, but also > the tremendous effort developers have made to build their stuff upon that..

But on the other side they still want to retain silly naming/other copyrights,
and hammer the rest when they find it convenient..

In essence is as if someone registered the word "Hammer" or "Computer",
and now wanted to have control/profit from a concept/tool that has become standard/universal..


One solution could always be creating/using a Open standard that DAW/Plug developers embraced as such,
rendering the VST standard pointless/obsolete in the long run..

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2021

It's not really a double standard, it's the trademark laws that makes companies do this shit. You have to actively defend a trademark to retain it, for instance, Linux is a trademark:

As for open standards, there's LV2 but that's virtually unheard of outside open source software, and the problem is compounded that VST3 is GPL these days. So it's free software, though the standard is controlled by Steinberg (unless majority of VST devs support a fork at some point), and it's still copyrighted and trademarked.

 

I look forward to this being most of my homescreens, now that Steinbug has taken over:

 

Somehow it's all about the money. You can't equate cracked software with lost sales. Everyone who creates software knows beforehand that he will soon be able to download his software from the Internet. Without the Internet, Steinberg would not have this worldwide sale. As if they were going to go broke. In Russia there are 100 rubles on the table. Either I buy something to eat from it or I buy software from it. Both are not possible.

The internet is out of control - they work hard to sue the legal caste and warning attorneys in particular, but the other side is very resourceful. When a job doesn't yield enough or, in other words, some work all day without leaving much to buy software. Should they then be "excluded" from the digital revolution? Give people more money then they can buy your products too. Or lower rents and fuel prices and taxes.
Late Roman decadence ...