I totally get what you're saying, and since you covered a lot of points, I'm going to address them one by one and that should be enough for the others as well. Then there is hopefully not going to be any further discussion about this topic.
I'll explain our point of view.
Originally, there was no plan to impose limits. Only after we saw how our servers were being hammered into oblivion by many individuals downloading like the world is going to end, we had to make a quick decision. Especially because all of them, without exception, were trials.
The way this kind of usage looks to us is: people are trying to get the most out of their trial and then to never be seen again.
So we had to pull the plug.
Yes, I realize that. It's a result of in-house miscommunication and some technical difficulties we had, I apologize for this.
The intended way is for the application to display a proper explanation, that will be fixed, I hope, today.
That's the plan. This just had to happen fast, so we'll have to add the missing pieces today.
just yesterday.
People who have been with us in the past, know that we take privacy issues extremely seriously.
As a precaution, the software handles some of it's tasks remotely, so it can't be easily reversed and implemented by competitors or others.
For us to make sure, that the server is not being misused by other software (which wouldn't be a first), we need to do license checking. So your license ID is passed along with the request.
Nothing else is, your credentials will NEVER be sent to our servers.
This, of course, implies, that we can monitor how many requests are being made per license. It was not planned to keep an eye on that, originally, but after what happened the last few days, this needs to be done.
Another reason for limitations, btw, is that we don't want to be as "loud" and reckless as most pirates already are.
Redfox's applications are traditionally about "fair use".
Downloading 100 movies per day is so far from fair use, that I don't really want to bother explaining the difference.
This application certainly will be noticed, but the more problems it causes for the providers, the harder they will have to fight it. That's not in our customer's interest.