It also has a policy where if you damage the dongle, you have to buy again and get a 10% discount off the FULL price of the VST.
In the age of people gigging on laptops, I'm not entirely sure how they think they are gonna sell any more of them. I fancy it myself as it has quite a few 'familiar' sounds on it, but not with all the downsides.
I go to the NAMM (musical instrument manufacturers) trade show every year and work with music, sound, and church software vendors.
In the medical field, almost all software for performing and analyzing EKGs, X-rays, MRIs etc. comes by default with some sort of dongle-based protection. Apparently, it's not enough that you need the biggest dongle in the world (i.e. the machine itself!) to use the software. Some vendors do offer alternatives if you fight them hard enough but the default still is a trip to dongle town.
So, for example, it's not unusual that, by default, your half a million USD scanner, that includes a powerful workstation to control it (the one the technician uses behind the window) will only let you write CDs (for example, to give your patient a copy of his/her scan) if you pay an additional "CD Writing license"
Now, with PACS and centralization that have changed a bit, but still...
Same for a lot of other industrial equipment. In my (admittedly limited) experience, they get cracked pretty quickly by the owner, either before the factory ever gets any downtime, or right after the first time.
Actually, it's not.
Some idiot will get the idea that they can just "transfer the hard drive immediately" because they didn't pay enough money on their support contract to get 4 hour response rather than 48 hour response. The dongle prevents that.
Medical devices are certified for the entire device--that includes the specific PC and the specific version of operating system running on it.
This is only true if the software hasn’t been crack?