hi, as my username implies i'm an artist and am somewhat tech illiterate (alright, severely tech illiterate, my monkey brain knows shapes but 0 and 1s confuse it), and I need help cracking Nuke.

Now, if you dont know what Nuke is, I dont blame you, because its a very niche tool used in compositing (which is already pretty niche) and has become the industry standard over the decades because of its versatility and capabilities, heres a vid showing its latest release in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Wh7ekKx3E

It's legitimately an excellent software, and no real competition exists yet. Unfortunately the people who own The Foundry (the publisher) are greedy fucks, know they hold a monopomy on this kind of market, and an INDIE/student licence is 500 fuckin quid a year, which is far too much for a college student like me (or any solo artists). Now this is an issue because it's widely used in animation/VFX/film, and yet I can't learn how to use it properly with the free Non-Commercial version, which is limited and simply shit (half of the features are missing and you're limited to HD720, bleh). This really hurts my workflow and means I can't push my demoreel to the best of my abilities and build my skills up.

So after using this monkey brain of mine I realised I had no money and thus decided to crack it once my current school license runs out. However there's a (BIG) problem. See The Foundry is notorious for it's products, but it's also notorious for threatening individuals caught using cracked versions of their software, or suspected of it (usually it's the latter too lol). Here are a few threads on the topic, seems you get an email out of the blue demanding tens of thousands in damages and threat of legal action.

https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/the-foundry-is-spying-on-us-i-wonder-who-else/1600447/171

https://www.reddit.com/r/NukeVFX/comments/olw8t7/legal_advice/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/brm71n/the_foundry_license_compliance/

https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/7k35ve/psa_the_foundry_is_cracking_down_hard_on_piracy/

Now an important point here is that The Foundry is a UK company, and the UK has, it seems, ridiculously bad IP/Copyright/privacy laws and thus The Foundry abused the fuck out of em and put all kinds of shit in their software to spy on you. Apparently they can literally fish details of your projects and the name of your files, they can even tell when you create a node, down to the second... Obviously this is absolutely terrifying and should this happen to me i'm not joking when I say I would dissapear and become a sheperd in the french alps or something (yes i'm a disgusting sorry hexbear ). Now even though i'm legit terrified this could happen, I've still been snooping around trying to find cracked versions of the software and ended up finding a few, all of them use something called an RLM server to fool Nuke into thinking it's getting legit pings back from The Foundry.

Here are the links I used:

https://en.lbsite.org/the-foundry-nuke-studio/

https://rsload.net/soft/editor/23387-the-foundry-nuke-studio.html#comment (notoriously shitty speed on this one unless you shelled out for the premium)

Now this is where my many questions arise:

-Has anyone here used this sort of method before (using a server license thing to spoof software)?

-Is firewalling the software safe enough or should I completely disconnect while using to avoid any chances of the company tracing my IP and delivering some bullshit email with threats?

-How legal are these emails? Lots of people seem to say that you can just ignore them and they won't actually sue you because the EULA for Nuke is borderline illegal in many countries, including France?

I'm sure i'll think of more questions in the meantime but that's all I can think of for now, this is an absolute monster of a post but I really don't want to go to jail over some fucking software used to make slop