3 ms·

Ignore all the “piracy is actually wonderful” posts. Depending on your industry and product, you can lose a great deal of revenue from piracy. Circumventing li

Ignore all the “piracy is actually wonderful” posts. Depending on your industry and product, you can lose a great deal of revenue from piracy. Circumventing licensing restrictions, “sharing” keys, customers pretending to be other customers to avoid paying support agreements, I’ve seen it all. Some people view avoiding paying you as a legitimate way to do business, and will happily do so if they can get away with it. One mechanism to prevent this that actually works, is having a chunk of your functionality “cloud based”. Put new functionality server side and piracy loses its value. Make it so that the upgrade mechanism is through their account. Generally, stop thinking in terms of “registration” and start thinking in terms of “licence to access services”. Most other mechanisms are legal rather than technical, but these are hardest to pursue in the countries where piracy revenue loss will be most prevalent.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> you can lose a great deal of revenue from piracy. This argument falls apart when you recognize that people that pirate weren't going to pay anyways. Piracy isn't a lost sale. A lack of piracy doesn't mean more sales, it means fewer users. Yes, I pirated Photoshop (Who didn't?), but if I couldn't pirate Photoshop, the alternative was never going to be buying Photoshop, it would be using GIMP or something else.
- lll-o-lll 4y ago
  This just isn’t correct for much commercial and industrial software. Your customers are companies and they will avoid paying if they can get away with it. At least outside of the the US. Large swathes of Europe? Totally fine. India? China? Paying when you don’t have to would make you a fool! When you make piracy hard enough, they will pay. As a youth I pirated everything I could get my hands on, I’m not saying the photoshop example is invalid. I’m saying that if you are making software that’s used in a commercial setting, then piracy is a genuine problem that must be addressed.
- hermitcrab 4y ago
  >This argument falls apart when you recognize that people that pirate weren't going to pay anyways. There is a spectrum. Some people will never pay (e.g. teenagers, who don't have credit cards). Some people will always pay. A lot of people (most?) are in between. They will use a pirate copy if it is easy and they think can get away with it, otherwise they will pay. So some level of protection is important. But you shouldn't do anything that makes life more difficult for the people that are prepared to pay.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

> you can lose a great deal of revenue from piracy. This argument falls apart when you recognize that people that pirate weren't going to pay anyways. Piracy isn't a lost sale. A lack of piracy doesn't mean more sales, it means fewer users. Yes, I pirated Photoshop (Who didn't?), but if I couldn't pirate Photoshop, the alternative was never going to be buying Photoshop, it would be using GIMP or something else.

lll-o-lll 4y ago
This just isn’t correct for much commercial and industrial software. Your customers are companies and they will avoid paying if they can get away with it. At least outside of the the US. Large swathes of Europe? Totally fine. India? China? Paying when you don’t have to would make you a fool! When you make piracy hard enough, they will pay. As a youth I pirated everything I could get my hands on, I’m not saying the photoshop example is invalid. I’m saying that if you are making software that’s used in a commercial setting, then piracy is a genuine problem that must be addressed.
hermitcrab 4y ago
>This argument falls apart when you recognize that people that pirate weren't going to pay anyways. There is a spectrum. Some people will never pay (e.g. teenagers, who don't have credit cards). Some people will always pay. A lot of people (most?) are in between. They will use a pirate copy if it is easy and they think can get away with it, otherwise they will pay. So some level of protection is important. But you shouldn't do anything that makes life more difficult for the people that are prepared to pay.