4 ms·

Whoever down voted me obviously does not sell software online. I lose about 1,000 potential sales a month from entities linking license keys. I personally "feel

by pcunite 13y ago

Whoever down voted me obviously does not sell software online. I lose about 1,000 potential sales a month from entities linking license keys. I personally "feel" like Google could do "something" about it and spend a little less time worrying about known PR sites.

pcl 13y ago
As someone who has sold software online and seen license cracks for my product: it is hard to know the impact of cracks on your profit. Would the pirates have bought your software if the crack was not available? How many customers used a cracked version at one point before becoming a customer? How much profit do you lose by investing in making your licensing scheme harder to crack? We ended up deciding that our license keys were there to keep honest people honest, not to thwart people intent on abusing our licensing terms. Whether or not that was the most profitable choice is anyone's guess, but it certainly was nice to look at cracks as lead-gen and a bit of a compliment, rather than trying to wage a distracting war against people who were probably not going to pay us anything anyways.
- pcunite 13y ago
  I’m still agonizing over what to do ... thanks for sharing your experience. My first thought is that if thousands of Google links to keys and cracks did not exist, our sales would increase. As you've noted, it’s a time sink to fight it. That's why I want Google to at least "try" something to help us out. I mean, they want me to purchase ads from them, right?
mistercow 13y ago
I used to sell my software online (well, I still do, but not very actively). A few years ago, while searching out of curiosity, I found that a cracked license key for one of my apps had recently started floating around. Eventually I got around to disabling that key, but you know what notable difference I observed in sales before and after the cracked key became available? Zero. Why? Because people either pay for software or they don't. Some people who pay for software also pirate it. I have never encountered such a person who paid for software because they couldn't pirate it; rather, they paid for it because they wanted to support the author. Probably a few people like that do exist though, so out of the thousands of people pirating your software, you might have lost ten sales. Maybe. Generously. All of the others simply would have used something else if the cracked key hadn't been available. When many of us see a comment like yours, we feel much the same way that a mathematician probably feels when someone claims they have a proof that 0.9̅ ≠ 1. It's a broken argument that we've encountered many times before, and the fallacy of the argument is not even interesting to discuss anymore. Moreover, none of us have ever seen someone make that argument and then bring up interesting and novel points to the ensuing discussion. We know exactly how the conversation is going to go, and there's little motivation to run through the motions of it again.

by pcunite 13y ago

pcl 13y ago

As someone who has sold software online and seen license cracks for my product: it is hard to know the impact of cracks on your profit. Would the pirates have bought your software if the crack was not available? How many customers used a cracked version at one point before becoming a customer? How much profit do you lose by investing in making your licensing scheme harder to crack? We ended up deciding that our license keys were there to keep honest people honest, not to thwart people intent on abusing our licensing terms. Whether or not that was the most profitable choice is anyone's guess, but it certainly was nice to look at cracks as lead-gen and a bit of a compliment, rather than trying to wage a distracting war against people who were probably not going to pay us anything anyways.

pcunite 13y ago
I’m still agonizing over what to do ... thanks for sharing your experience. My first thought is that if thousands of Google links to keys and cracks did not exist, our sales would increase. As you've noted, it’s a time sink to fight it. That's why I want Google to at least "try" something to help us out. I mean, they want me to purchase ads from them, right?

mistercow 13y ago

I used to sell my software online (well, I still do, but not very actively). A few years ago, while searching out of curiosity, I found that a cracked license key for one of my apps had recently started floating around. Eventually I got around to disabling that key, but you know what notable difference I observed in sales before and after the cracked key became available? Zero. Why? Because people either pay for software or they don't. Some people who pay for software also pirate it. I have never encountered such a person who paid for software because they couldn't pirate it; rather, they paid for it because they wanted to support the author. Probably a few people like that do exist though, so out of the thousands of people pirating your software, you might have lost ten sales. Maybe. Generously. All of the others simply would have used something else if the cracked key hadn't been available. When many of us see a comment like yours, we feel much the same way that a mathematician probably feels when someone claims they have a proof that 0.9̅ ≠ 1. It's a broken argument that we've encountered many times before, and the fallacy of the argument is not even interesting to discuss anymore. Moreover, none of us have ever seen someone make that argument and then bring up interesting and novel points to the ensuing discussion. We know exactly how the conversation is going to go, and there's little motivation to run through the motions of it again.