Toxik Maintenance
So, I've been reading up on Discreet (sorry Autodesk Media and Entertainment) Toxik. Its a workgroup oriented collaborative compositor that uses an Oracle database to manage assets. Essentially, it means elements can be updated automatically within in a comp once they are changed. From the sounds of it, the collaborative aspect is the ONLY advantage it has over Shake 4 (I know enough of what's in Shake 4 to make this assessment).
The clincher is that Autodesk (as usual) "force" you to pay a maintenance fee of around $3700AU per seat per year. Failure to pay results in an eventual 'timeout', and the seat can no longer connect to the main database - it will ONLY work standalone.
I'm just wondering if sections 47D and 47E of the Copyright Act (1968) could apply in such a situation. Both those provisions are 'acts not constituting an infringement of copyright in computer programs' and allow licensers to reverse engineer software to 'make interoperable products' and to 'correct errors' respectively. But don't EULA's prohibit you from doing such things? Not in this country. Under s47H the provisions of any agreement which contrary to Division 4A (ss47AB-47H) are considered invalid to the extent of their contrariness.
To be honest, I'm not sure they do apply. Not directly anyway. You could try to make a program to connect the two pieces of the puzzle (the compositor and the database) without requiring a licence and argue its protected under 47D. Tough sell.
Frankly, I just think this kind of maintenance fee is the worst kind of rent-seeking and should be discouraged from a legal and economic perspective. If it DIDN'T turn off features I wouldn't be so worried, but at this stage you're paying in excess of $3k per seat in 'renting' a frigging database.
In the end, I think this is going to encourage lots of facilities to look at how they can use other tools to achieve the same thing as Toxik does. I think a lot of what Toxik does do can be achieved with intelligent leveraging of Spotlight and CoreData in Tiger. While they may be mac-specific solutions, there's no reason you couldn't use symlinks or some nifty python scripting to bring the same (or similar) functionality to linux boxen.
The clincher is that Autodesk (as usual) "force" you to pay a maintenance fee of around $3700AU per seat per year. Failure to pay results in an eventual 'timeout', and the seat can no longer connect to the main database - it will ONLY work standalone.
I'm just wondering if sections 47D and 47E of the Copyright Act (1968) could apply in such a situation. Both those provisions are 'acts not constituting an infringement of copyright in computer programs' and allow licensers to reverse engineer software to 'make interoperable products' and to 'correct errors' respectively. But don't EULA's prohibit you from doing such things? Not in this country. Under s47H the provisions of any agreement which contrary to Division 4A (ss47AB-47H) are considered invalid to the extent of their contrariness.
To be honest, I'm not sure they do apply. Not directly anyway. You could try to make a program to connect the two pieces of the puzzle (the compositor and the database) without requiring a licence and argue its protected under 47D. Tough sell.
Frankly, I just think this kind of maintenance fee is the worst kind of rent-seeking and should be discouraged from a legal and economic perspective. If it DIDN'T turn off features I wouldn't be so worried, but at this stage you're paying in excess of $3k per seat in 'renting' a frigging database.
In the end, I think this is going to encourage lots of facilities to look at how they can use other tools to achieve the same thing as Toxik does. I think a lot of what Toxik does do can be achieved with intelligent leveraging of Spotlight and CoreData in Tiger. While they may be mac-specific solutions, there's no reason you couldn't use symlinks or some nifty python scripting to bring the same (or similar) functionality to linux boxen.
posted by stu willis at
10:36 am
1 Comments:
insightful. I think you pretty much nailed it on the head. Response to Toxic at NAB was pretty lacklustre, and I think most people walked away from demos wondering exactly who Discreet thought they were going to sell this product to.
By
Anonymous, at Thu Apr 28, 06:18:00 am AEST
Post a Comment
<< Home