Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

Hi, I'm selling a software and cracks are given in forums on the internet. The thing is, theses users don't come to my product page for getting updates for example, so I think it's a loss for me because I can't reach them and talk to them. I feel like I won't ever be able to convert them to paying customers.

I'm wondering what I can do about it. Could I add a "I cracked your software, is it wrong ?" in the FAQ and try to not show it if I detect the software is not cracked ?

What if I distribute the pirated version myself ? Wouldn't that look weird to paying customers ?

Should I add an infinitely renewable 15 days trial instead of a limited features trial ?

Do you know of projects that went open source / free software and how they handled it ?

Thanks !

PS : I didn't say Piracy was bad in itself. I spent my childhood pirating stuff and now my livelihood is selling software.. I have faith that some of my pirate users can become my clients one day or another and I would like to take care of this issue myself rather than letting people going to underground forums and download virus.

How you address this depends greatly on your software and who it's marketed towards. Piracy can be a hint that you haven't come up with the best business strategy for that market.

Often what's best is to meet the market where it is--would you rather have more people using and aware of your software or only small amount of people people that know about your software and pay for it? The answer in many scenarios is to have more people using it regardless of whether they pay you because they can convert others into future sales and grow your market.

Software and its markets vary greatly, so it's hard to give a strategy that works for all software, but I've seen one model be fairly successful over time: basically using a subset of users to subsidize the rest of users. Find out who's deriving the most value from your product and get them to pay you, rather than trying to scrape an equal amount from everyone. This can be done many different ways, but are most commonly done with feature gating or providing external services. The idea is that if your software is more available, more people have the opportunity of deriving value from it and ultimately end up paying you.

But piracy is good right? Death to DRM!

If someone doesn't want to pay they should be able to get the content for free, then they can decide if you deserve to be paid.

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That content above seems to be very popular sentiment on HN and other techy places. I don't understand that since all you hurt are people like the author of this post.

The tech community needs to get its act together and decide to support intellectual property rights because as tech people that's all we have.

And don't think this only applies to proprietary software. MIT, GPL, Apache, etc are all licenses and are all capable of just as much abuse as your traditional EULA.

Don't worry about users who crack or pirate software. This is not the target demographic you will have much luck with turning into paying customers. Fixate on your actually software. If kids in third world countries are your primary users its time to build something new. That's a signal you don't want to ignore.

First - if they wouldn't have paid anyway, you haven't "lost" anything (you've actually gained something)

Second, your pricing must be turning off those who would [possibly] pay, but opt for the cracked edition due to cost

Third, focus on support: you can download, install, and run OpenNMS, for example, totally 100% for free. But if you want support beyond the mailing list, you pay for it.