I get that the camera and Resolve each promote each other. I would have rather BMD have only provided a certificate for people to redeem for a version of Resolve instead of a dongle, but it's not my company or my decision to make. I think the problem was complicated a few years ago when BMD began providing free Resolve dongles with camera purchases, and that started a small dongle market on eBay for 'new / never-used' ones. But I'd say if you don't have a real box and a real serial number, there's always going to be a question whether it's real. You can argue this hurt both pirates and also honest users who thought they were getting the real thing. (I'm an honest guy: I have no problem paying for the real thing.) From roughly Pro Tools 10 on, it became extremely difficult to crack it, forcing many to fork over more money for the real thing. As one example: a few years ago, Avid/Pro Tools was so overrun by pirates, they completely scuttled Pro Tools, rewrote it from scratch, required an entirely new kind of dongle, and made sure the program constantly checked 'the mothership' over the net every so often. Pirated software and counterfeit goods are a huge problem in business. No any chances for refound for me, after almost a year since this purchase. But another side, why BM didn't mentioned anywhere, anytime that fake dongles are on the market, and how to recognize them?. BM don't owe us free software (yep, my fault, no questions). I guess I've learnt my lesson the hard way here! It's going to take me a while to get together the money to buy a new licence code from an authorised reseller here in the UK as most of my money goes on the family essentials.īasically I understand BMD's position, but some form of goodwill gesture/amnesty might not have gone amiss as there was no prior warning that BMD was aware of fake dongles and the only way to find out was boot up 15.2 only for it to say 'Enter Serial Number' (had to come here to find out what was happening).Īlex Potemkin wrote:As many wrote in the closed thread. Mine is out of return period, but I have managed to engage with the seller about a potential partial refund (better than nothing I guess!), but it's totally at his discretion. I figure that ~70% of retail is what a secondhand licence for software would typically cost. I can get behind that, as I've been a fake dongle 'victim' - purchased what I believed to be a genuine secondhand dongle for ~70% of original retail price before Black Friday (that apparently alerted BMD to the presence of the fakes), not even knowing you COULD fake a hardware dongle! (Clearly I'm naïve about these things )

Davinci resolve studio 17 dongle