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

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.