A couple of related notes.
It was discussed here a while back, so for those among you who care, be advised that all Aurora Graphics products forbid the transfer of the license to any third party. Buying used software gains you access to the images but you are buying just that ... access without permission or licensed rights.
We used to be a dealer for Aurora Graphics while also being a developer of digital art ourselves. We had a fundamental disagreement though over including user guides with such products. Aurora does not include printed user guides and only recently began making PDFs available at their website. We always include printed user guides ... for two reasons:
1. It completes the product and adds usability and value to it.
2. It can and is used as a barrier against illegal duplication and redistribution.
A lot of our marketing is by telephone contact. I can't begin to tell you the amount of customers we spoke with after selling an Aurora product who were angry with us about the lack of any reasonable way to know what they actually had purchased a license for. Some we spoke with had it sitting on a shelf six months later unused.
From my perspective, I believe that Aurora's products are currently the most illegally duplicated art products on the market. Users recognize that they can get most of their money back by archiving the art on another disk or their hard drives and then selling the original disk(s). So that's what they do. I would guess that for every legal copy licensed there is a spawn of at least ten resales as each buyer does the same thing.
So this has three points ... again for those among you who care:
- Buying used software may not grant you the rights you think you are getting. With software, possession means nothing. License rights means everything.
- Buying software without adequate documentation, legally or otherwise, may stand as a barrier to you receiving reasonable value for your investment.
- Aurora Graphics has contributed heavily to their own problem by not protecting their artwork with documentation that would serve to make illegal duplication a more difficult thing to do.