Student licence question

[Anonymous]

We have a number of licences including AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD 2013, AutoCAD 2014 network and AutoCAD 2014 LT. The installation of AutoCAD 2011 has performed well for more than 4 years. In the last few weeks, when opening files, we now get a message saying that the drawings have been produced with an educational licence and plots have simmilar messages printed on drawing borders. We did ask for a student licence for one of our apprentice draughtsmen, but have not as yet installed.

All these programs are French language - we are based in French speaking Switzerland. 

I am the IT manager for the company and you can reply in English or French.

John Zirmer

CFA Ingénieurs Conseils SA

informatique@cfa-ing.ch

[Patchy]

Download 2015 for 30 days trial and open those drawings, save them and I think the stamp will be gone.

From this article:

http://blogs.rand.com/support/2014/04/relief-from-the-dreaded-autodesk-educational-plot-stamp.html

[rkmcswain]

You'll need to understand the conditions that cause the plot stamp to appear and under what situations it will not appear.

It's all explained here:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Educati...

[Anonymous]

I appreciate that information from a student licence version can furhter "infect" subsequent drawings, but we do not have student licence versions in our organisations. I will however make an attempt, as suggested, to install AuTOCAD 2015 (30 day evaluation) on a computer and test the effect on a few selected files

[dgorsman]

You don't need to have an active license.  Somebody may have downloaded a DWG file from the internet which had the EDU flag.  That could include a client or vendor providing files for your use.  Now that you've been using it, it's been spreading through your own files.  In addition to using a new release to "purge" the EDU stamp I *highly* recommend you do a forensic audit on your files (including blocks, XREFs, templates... everything!) to find the real culprit otherwise it will keep coming back.

[Anonymous]

We used Trueview 2016 to convert the files which displayed the student licence information, all of which were in the same project which indicates that the source was info supplied by someone in the consulting team. The conversions seem to have worked well.

As for the source of the problem, you spoke of "a forensic audit on your files (including blocks, XREFs, templates... everything!) to find the real culprit otherwise it will keep coming back". Can you elaborate? Required software etc.

[Patchy]

Maybe you can use this add-on to find all the infected drawings:

http://www.jtbworld.com/edufinder.htm

[dgorsman · Accepted solution]

You work your way from known EDU flagged drawings back into your system.  What was used in those drawings (blocks?  XREFs?  Drawings inserted wholesale?) - those should be checked.  If those were modified between receiving and releasing the flagged drawings, then they need to be checked.  Anything which was used to modify *those* drawings are then checked using the same process.  This also includes checking with users who worked on the drawings - are they using DWGs from places other than your central storage?  Those need to be checked as well.  It sounds like this will track back to whoever sent the drawings, so they should be notified and any further drawings from them screened before you do *anything* with them until they consistently deliver unflagged drawings.  If they refuse to fix or recognize the problem it could be time to take further action.

The process is grinding and brutal and time consuming, but you *don't* want this coming back and that will happen if miss even just one instance.