Lets say you pirate CAD software like Autodesk Inventor or Dassault Solidworks.

Which company is more aggressive toward pirates? Which software is more dangerous to pirate?

For example I heard Adobe is pretty lax about piracy and it’s usually no big deal if you pirate Photoshop. So I wonder how it is with CAD companies.

I have seen a lot of posts about people receiving letter from Dassault about pirated Solidworks. But not so much about Autodesk. So I wonder if Autodesk software is safer to pirate than Dassault software.

Thanks for any advice or experience.

  • young_broccoli@fedia.io
    0·
    3 months ago

    like sending models/drawings to other companies/clients or whatever.

    How can they tell if a document was made on a pirated copy? And how might one avoid that detection

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      You can never share any of the software specific formats ever (.ipt for inventor, .dwg for Autocad, .sldprt for solidworks, etc). All those formats include fingerprints inside that are not user visible or modifyable but include detailed info about the copy of the software license that created it. If anyone else ever opens those with a legit copy, the software itself phone home about it and they’ll know, because whatever license the pirate copy shows will not exist on Autodesk/Dassault/whatever’s side.

      Platform agnostic formats likely embed this kind of Metadata too somewhere, but it can probably be stripped, and most of the time when sharing an agnostic for.at like .step/.stl the opening software is not made by autodesk or whoever.

      Finally it could just legit be a user report. Companies like autodesk have a reporting system to send evidence of suspected pirated software use directly to their legal teams. It doesnt happen often but if youre using like a 7 year old copy of Inventor and something feels off… yeah. So you’re never truly safe if you have to share your models at all.

      • young_broccoli@fedia.io
        0·
        3 months ago

        Damn you proprietary software!!!

        Thanks for the info. Seems like it would be safer to use librecad to create and autocad just as a reader/converter. Why people accept this, do this formats offer advantages over the open ones?

        Edit: Sorry if im asking too many questions