License Agreement Violators
Annosoft SDKs are licensed on the honor system. Almost all of our customers are conscientious about usage restrictions, per-game accounting, and payment. It’s been great and we have no intention of gluing onerous enforcement into our SDKs.
Sometimes the honor system doesn’t work out so well. We have [only] a few standouts over the last 12 years. This page showcases them and describes the issues. Maybe this helps to bring these companies back into compliance with their obligations under their respective agreements. Maybe not.
Disclaimer: These are all opinions except for the facts.
Di-O-Matic
It’s complicated.
In 2002, we licensed our Annosoft SDK to Di-O-Matic. It was a foolish, newbie, error. Di-O-Matic’s “internal” phoneme analysis is actually the 2003 version of the Annosoft SDK. The short of it is that I screwed up and helped boot up another automatic lipsync company. Nice job dude. Oh well… The ongoing problem is that Di-O-Matic’s distribution of our Lipsync SDK is often done in direct violation of the EULA. They aren’t supposed to compete in our sandbox using our stuff, but they do.
Here’s our beef:
Di-O-Matic uses Annosoft’s own technology to compete against Annosoft, in our primary market, in a willful violation of a specific clause from the EULA.
We primarily license lipsync SDKs to the game industry. Our core business is game middleware and our core usage is batch processing of 1000s of audio files for lipsync in games. The EULA has specific restrictions against using the SDK in a manner in competition with Annosoft SDKs. Di-O-Matic’s vomBatch uses an old Annosoft SDK and is licensed and marketed to game companies in competition with our SDKs. Additionally, Annosoft was already a key player in this market long before vomBatch was launched. Their distribution of vomBatch to game companies is, thus, a willful and direct violation of the non-competitive clause of the EULA.
If Di-O-Matic wants to respect Annosoft’s rights under the EULA, it should cease licensing all of its batch functionality to the game industry, cease licensing products that provide low level access to SDK functions, and start being a good citizen.
PQ Computing
PQ Computing licensed the Textless Lipsync SDK for use in PQ Talking Photo in December 2007. The license fee is annual, and 4 years overdue. Yet, PQ Talking Photo is still available.
We decided PQ is an acronym for Payment Questionable and moved on.
On the bright side, we’re grateful that it didn’t morph into annosft.cn (a “new” lipsync sdk provider) DOH! don’t give ’em any ideas!
Bejing University of Technology
This is a funny one. They licensed the Text Based Lipsync SDK for academic use. 25% academic discount! That’s above average, but hey, China is the place to be, and so on. We were asked to divide the invoice into two payments. No Problem! We delivered the SDK after the first payment and never heard from them again.
We got scammed by a PHD. I am honored, actually.
Everyone Else
Restores our faith in humanity!