If you are Academic, try www.academicsuperstore.com

Also beware of bidding price up. If not a buy at once I have seen people end up paying more on ebay than a product may be available for at a real dealer or directly from the manufacturer.

In grad school I once saw a $20 bill get auctioned for over $70. Learned an important lesson about auctions.

You are smart to be cautious. There is a lot of pirated software on eBay but I have successfully bought original software from there with a bit of background work.

I would contact the seller and ask if this is new in a sealed box or used. If used, are these the original silk screened CD’s from Sony or are they CD-R’s. Also ask if the Getting Started Guide with the serial number printed on it is included. Finally, if it’s used, ask if the seller is willing to contact Sony to transfer the serial number to you. This MUST be done in order for your copy to be legal. Otherwise when you go to upgrade later, you won’t be able to because the serial number isn’t registered in your name.

Always, look at the sellers rating and read the negative comments if you can. Also check any previous auctions of theirs that still have links and see if they are selling the same used software again, and again, and again. You will be shocked and amazed by what you find. Right now if you search on Sonic Foundry on eBay you won’t find one legitimate copy. Just tons of pirated copies for $9.99 with negative feed back complaining the software is pirated, and tons of positive feedback on the exact same software. I can only conclude that the people who said positive things about pirated software are either too stupid to know the difference (not very likely) or went to eBay because it’s the best place to buy pirated software.

<soapbox>

I purchase original copies of ACID Pro 4.0 and Sound Forge 5.0 with printed manuals from eBay and both sellers contacted Sony to transfer their ownership to me and Sony sent me a new serial number each time. So it can be done. You just have to ask the right questions and then use your own judgment as to trusting the answers you get. I contacted one seller and asked if they were the original CD’s and he replied, “they are in the same condition that I bought them”. I guess that was his way of saying they were pirated copies but he didn’t want to admit it. Good Luck.

~jr

From what I have gathered, Sony used to send Vegas5 Academic in the exact same box with exact same serial number scheme as the full retail version. The only single difference was that the Academic version had a sticker on the box stating so.

Some smart person figured it out and removed the stickers and even Sony can't tell the difference between these originally sold at academic price and the full versions any more.

Since then Sony has stopped selling the Vegas5 through one of its distributors (the ones who were to blame allegedly) there are still a lot of these old academic copies floating around that cannot be separated from the real deal. The dealer cost is higher on the real full license than what they are selling for on eBay.

The new Academic versions will have their own set of serial number types, so they can be verified by Sony whether they started their life as academic or full version.

However I just checked with Sony, and as long as you are eligible for academic pricing at time of purchase, you can use the software as long as you live, unlike some other academic licenses (Microsoft for example) which requres you to remove the license once your academic affiliation ends. I am a part time graduate student, so I qualify for academic pricing.

So buying the Vegas off eBay is definetely an academic version re-branded to full version, but if you are OK with that, there is nothing and noone that can prove that you didn't buy a full licensed version.