Just to throw in my opinion here.

My main concern is robust reliability for me - the end user. The current system works well in that case - to have the ability to do my work uninterrupted despite network conditions.

If phoning home fortnightly to attempt to disable unused licences keeps costs down for me - all the better; so long as no compromise is made on my earlier point.

All in all - I am fine with how Magix has implemented their licensing system.

(This is easy to say as I've encountered no problems - I'm sure I would sing a different song had it caused issues for me as some users claim is the case).

I buy software, never ask me to prove it again.

I want to say I one read an article by Ken Williams (or an interview) where piracy was considered an accepted fact and was part of the cost they'd factor in for their products. They did have anti-piracy stuff, but if you bought the game it was yours & you wearn't dependent on them.

In the world where a Google/Youtube or Facebook can remove your "rights" w/o warning for any reason they feel reasonable, there's nothing stopping a company like Magix (or Apple or MS) from saying "Nah, you're not allowed to use our stuff any more" and taking away your rights to use the software.

You would rewrite the legal for an international company?

Good luck with that.

Buy some stock and then you can talk.

I think requiring validation during the installation process is reasonable. Further restrictions are not. I don't think a product needs to keep checking home to see how many times a license number has been used. 1 + 1 is always 2 and that doesn't change every month, every two weeks or every day. A system should be able to keep track of the number of installations when the product is installed, period.

Your premise is not correct. Pirate software doesn't contact the company to validate it's licence. Code is altered in some way so that activation or licence verification is done via nefarious methods so piracy bypasses legitmate validation. The next weapon against piracy is phoning home. You might make the argument that a pirate would also have altered the code so that the software doesnt' phone home and also doesn't need to, & will remain active.

For whatever reason pirates have much less success in defeating periodic licence checks. I don't know if Vegas has more anti piracy methods other than codec activation, but it can be seen the first measure - software activation is easily defeated, while the 2nd probably won't be. It's for this reason the phone home is necessary for the continued financial success of Vegas & users should be understanding of this. You don't want a situation as happened with sony where vegas just stagnated and there was very little development for years

+1.

What would a reasonable Validation System and Eula look like? The one we got. ET phone home :)

All good unless the company goes bust.

For whatever reason pirates have much less success in defeating periodic licence checks. I don't know if Vegas has more anti piracy methods other than codec activation, but it can be seen the first measure - software activation is easily defeated, while the 2nd probably won't be. It's for this reason the phone home is necessary for the continued financial success of Vegas & users should be understanding of this. You don't want a situation as happened with sony where vegas just stagnated and there was very little development for years

Got any hard evidence for your first claim? I'd like to follow up on it if you have. According to Gary the current phoning home fails silently if Vegas can't connect so how can it be effective? My actual experience has been that it makes Vegas more buggy. Where's the evidence that Sony allowed Vegas to stagnate because of piracy? There has to be a better way than code that hold the user hostage to the software company.