Reply To: Native Instruments Insolvency and Updates

[LinkedMusicians]

Now, I realize that I will lose some folks on this, but while one might think this is similar to what occurred with Gibson’s sale of intellectual property to BandLab, it’s actually quite different.

BandLab bought all of the intellectual property (IP), including the source code for SONAR, brand trademarks, and patents not the customer database or obligations. Gibson retained the legal liabilities and any remaining corporate debt of the original Cakewalk subsidiary. Of course, BandLab also hired core Sonar developers like Noel. Again, BandLab didn’t buy and takeover the Cakewalk customer database. We had to opt-in to BandLab’s database. With NI, the insolvency administrator is trying to scrub the debt from the parts of the company for sale and sell the various parts of NI, including customer databases as part of the core assets to ensure continuity.

When BandLab bought Cakewalk’s assets, they didn’t buy the obligations between Gibson and the users. That’s why those lifetime deals or any customer agreements didn’t have to be honored by BandLab. In effect, BandLab was saying to customers, “We didn’t make that deal with you, so we don’t have to honor it. That was with Gibson, not us.” Instead, BandLab attempted to buy the goodwill of the customer base by giving away product (what was once, and is now again, called Sonar) for free for a limited time.

From my understanding, the company that buys from NI has the option of doing what BandLab did and telling customers, “you’re not my problem.” The new buyer, for example, is unlikely to give your Komplete 15 license 10 years of free support — you bought that from a company with different owners, and legally, they’re not obligated to do that. However, not honoring existing NI licenses, while legally their right, would be brand suicide. So, I think it’s most likely that buyers will be honoring existing licenses to some extent, but likely limiting or ending support of older products. They may very likely do things like revise or terminate things like NI’s generous license transfer policy.

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