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Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#41

Post by jsheard »

ttoinou wrote: post #25
Kpourdeilami wrote: post #20

Can you track the country in which the users are pirating your software from? If say 90% of the people pirating your software are in countries that don't have access to credit cards, then it'll be impossible to convert them to paid users

Yes and also in cheaper country my product might be too expensive. I'm going to look where people are from in the underground forums and think about it, thanks.

In the games industry it's common to have different prices for different regions, with lower prices for countries with less wealth and/or rampant piracy.

For example Steam is selling Hellblade for 30 USD in the US, but only 17 USD in Brazil or 12 USD in Russia. Perhaps you could emulate that model?

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#42

Post by detaro »

ttoinou wrote: post #22
tu6 wrote: post #7

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.

My paying customers are professional in the industry I work on. Most of my pirates might very well be "amateurs" in the sense that they don't make money with theirs activity and I'm fine with it. I just think it's too bad for me theses people go somewhere else to download my product and talk about it. There must be something I could do

Some professional software has student or hobby licenses. Finding the right set of limitations and price is an interesting balance though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#43

Post by unclenoriega »

JamesBaxter wrote: post #21

Many people I know have always pirated software and TV and said once there was a reasonable way to get it legally they would pay for it. I haven't seen this be the case. I don't think you can convert pirates. It is possible however to convert legal users to pirates by having systems that annoy people who have legally purchased. I don't know how you strike the balance. I hate the entitlement of people who pirate stuff…

It's comments like this that make me want to stop paying for things. Some pirates can be converted. Some can't. No need to be overly broad.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#44

Post by dasil003 »

ttoinou wrote: post #39
iamben wrote: post #34

A while back a friend of mine told me he installed a 'clean my Mac' application, thought it was decent and went looking for a crack. So the story went - the top link was one to their own website with full instructions on how to crack the app - something like - www.appname.com/how-to-crack-appname/, or whatever. On the page was complete and detailed instructions on how to crack it yourself using a hex editor or decomp…

Yes I might do that in the future, I have to be the first google result of "MyProduct Crack" ;) But if the official author of the plugin gives it for free it sends a weird message to paying customers, no ?

Well you wouldn't link it from your main site nav, it would just be for people searching for the crack directly. If people find it that way then you have to assume they're at least on the fence and are likely to pirate anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#45

Post by ttoinou »

jzelinskie wrote: post #3

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 h…

Thanks for the answer. I have a lot to think about !

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#46

Post by iamben »

ttoinou wrote: post #39
iamben wrote: post #34

A while back a friend of mine told me he installed a 'clean my Mac' application, thought it was decent and went looking for a crack. So the story went - the top link was one to their own website with full instructions on how to crack the app - something like - www.appname.com/how-to-crack-appname/, or whatever. On the page was complete and detailed instructions on how to crack it yourself using a hex editor or decomp…

Yes I might do that in the future, I have to be the first google result of "MyProduct Crack" ;) But if the official author of the plugin gives it for free it sends a weird message to paying customers, no ?

From an SEO standpoint I don't think it would be too hard to rank for that :-)

I guess the whole point was not to give it for free, but to make someone realise that they could get it for free with X hours work and learning. But most people are too lazy - those determined to steal will do it anyway, and those that can be converted to pay you've given yourself a platform to get them to understand why they should.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#47

Post by chx »

ttoinou wrote: post #39
iamben wrote: post #34

A while back a friend of mine told me he installed a 'clean my Mac' application, thought it was decent and went looking for a crack. So the story went - the top link was one to their own website with full instructions on how to crack the app - something like - www.appname.com/how-to-crack-appname/, or whatever. On the page was complete and detailed instructions on how to crack it yourself using a hex editor or decomp…

Yes I might do that in the future, I have to be the first google result of "MyProduct Crack" ;) But if the official author of the plugin gives it for free it sends a weird message to paying customers, no ?

Even when I had like three different claims to a free PhpStorm license as a top Drupal contributor to 7 and 8 and also as someone who writes some PHP documentation I was still paying for it because great software deserves to be paid.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#48

Post by ttoinou »

jsheard wrote: post #41
ttoinou wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and also in cheaper country my product might be too expensive. I'm going to look where people are from in the underground forums and think about it, thanks.

In the games industry it's common to have different prices for different regions, with lower prices for countries with less wealth and/or rampant piracy. For example Steam is selling Hellblade for 30 USD in the US, but only 17 USD in Brazil or 12 USD in Russia. Perhaps you could emulate that model?

I'm selling on a marketplace that don't allow that.

Btw I have a friend buying really cheap games from cheaper european countries :D

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#49

Post by yodon »

ttoinou wrote: post #19
1388 wrote: post #4

Old methods (90s): - turn to the law (DCMA) - prevent people from modifying code New methods: - change to a SaaS model - change the backend to an API, users order API key - ping home from your software code or every keystroke like in Windows. - free product, offer training + ads

change the backend to an API What do you mean ?

Don't ship all the code to the client PC, run at least a small portion of the code on a server that you control. Doing this makes "cracking" your app useless because it still can't do the job without an account on the server for the server-side processing. This is basically what every MMO in existence did. MMO's are games that can only be played if you have a server-side account, because they took a chunk of code that historically would have been part of the normal game loop and moved it to the server where it can't be pirated. Yes, MMO's also enabled multi-player, but that could have been done a million ways that kept the core code on the end user's PC. The real advance was noticing that a server-subscription based MMO can print money while a non-server-based client-authoritative game architecture dies a rapid financial death due to piracy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with piracy?

#50

Post by ttoinou »

aerovistae wrote: post #35
JamesBaxter wrote: post #21

Many people I know have always pirated software and TV and said once there was a reasonable way to get it legally they would pay for it. I haven't seen this be the case. I don't think you can convert pirates. It is possible however to convert legal users to pirates by having systems that annoy people who have legally purchased. I don't know how you strike the balance. I hate the entitlement of people who pirate stuff…

Speaking as a prolific pirate, I currently pay for Spotify because it's just so convenient. I currently pay for HBO Now because I don't want to wait an extra hour to watch Game of Thrones. I pay for games on Steam, but I still pirate most major creative software like Adobe, Windows Office, or DAWs and their plugins...I just have absolutely zero incentive to do otherwise. And before anyone guilt trips me on morality,…

   but I still pirate most major creative software
But do you make money out of this activity ?

   Yet society deems that arbitrarily acceptable
Well it feels like society is OK with pirated content, no ? I only know 1 person in my environment that attacks me about it.
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