Why Pay for Bootlegs?

Over the last two weeks, my Eudora email client's In box has been inundated with messages bearing the subject lines:

Autodesk AutoCAD 2008
AutoCAD ready to download
AutoCAD OEM version
AutoCAD 2008 software adds features to help make everyday tasks

These are spams for a site that sells bootleg software, such as AutoCAD 2008 for $129.95. (They claim, incorrectly, that the retail price is $6720.) The good news is that students needn't pay $130 for a bootleg copy.

Students and teachers can get it for free from Autodesk's own students.autodesk.com Web site. All you need is an email address associated with an approved educational institution, and to register your personal information. Now that I am teaching part-time at BCIT, I tried it, and found that it works.

As does most Autodesk software, it runs for 30 days. Enter a valid license number (provided by the school), and the software runs for 14 months, long enough until the next annual update is released.

Comments

[Stefan Boeykens]

Our students (of architecture) have been pointed to that site for the last two years. It is only last week that I noticed that AutoCAD Architecture has been included. Previously, to access AutoCAD, they needed to install Civil3D or one of the other "verticals" based on AutoCAD. Initially, the site only hosted Revit and Inventor and a few others (e.g. VIZ), but ADT and AutoCAD were not amongst them.

I appreciate the effort of Autodesk. Now I should still try to convince our students that the "watermarks" in plotted documents are there for a reason. It is an issue, when students have to defend their design for a jury, with "AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT" stamped onto the borders of the page. They often prefer an illegal copy, when they discover this watermark.

[Erik Deyo]

I teach part time at a local college where students don't have access to a school email, ex. the .edu extension. The site allows me to invite them. I find it really nice to be able to do that.

Erik

[Scott Sheppard]

When students defend their designs for a jury, isn't this in an educational setting? As such, why is the "AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT" an issue?

[Bill Fane]

I have pointed my students (also at BCIT where Ralph now teaches) to the Autodesk student site for several years now. They love it, but I do remind them of the watermark. As part of their final term, our students do a term project wherein they work for a local sponsor company as though they were a consultant.

Last year one student was working on a project wherein he created a library of standard details and a VBA program to automate their insertion into host drawings.

Unfortunately the "student version" watermark follows anything pasted or inserted into a host drawing, and doesn't turn up until the plot on paper. By this time he had inadvertently "polluted" several hundred drawings. Deleting the pastings or insertions does not remove the watermark.

Oops.