Whatever you do, don't punish your paying customers for being honest. If your anti-piracy measures have restrictions, bugs, or inconvenience your paying customers, you're allowing the pirates to release a superior product to your own.
Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
171–180 of 297 posts
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#172Additionally, as another commenter mentioned, piracy is not theft. Someone who pirates your software will almost certainly never pay for it; it's not a lost revenue opportunity. Consider it free promotion and popularization of your product: any publicity is good publicity.
Absolutely correct. If I can piggyback to elaborate:
Piracy is *not* theft, it’s ‘copyright infringement’—they had to define a legal term because the courts determined that copying content does not deprive the IP owner of whatever-it-was-that-was-copied.
And assuming OPs product has some productivity or business uses, many pirate users are simply b2b sales in embryo. As a college student I may have pirated software to help get an assignment done, (AV editing, or something), which later in my career I advocated to my business unit leader that we should buy, and I could demonstrate it too!
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#173Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…
There was a videogame that got famous because it was pirated, it was a management game about setting up a gaming company. Turns out, the pirated copy had a special feature where the player would feel immense economic pressure from piracy, so a bunch of players asked how to win against this, it was pretty hard and really fun for people who knew what was going on. Point is, you could hide an Easter Egg for pirated vers…
One of the Command and Conquer games (Red Alert 2?) would blow up your MCV 30 (or thereabouts) seconds into a game if it detected piracy. Funny, albeit, entirely less subtle.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#174These aren’t your customers. The user who is willing to stomach the time and risks associated with cracked software is NOT your target market anyway. This is essentially a free trial program for “aspirational users” who will circulate it for you. I’ve had my software (games) pirated, and been a pirate in my youth. Now I wouldn’t consider pirating because I have more money than time now. I suspect your actual addressa…
> The user who is willing to stomach the time and risks associated with cracked software is NOT your target market anyway. I vehemently disagree. Cracked users of commercial software ARE your target market that, for any reason, can't afford to pay you. They would if they could. When I was a broke teenager, I pirated a lot of software, games and music I later paid for when I had enough money to do so. Piracy can be an…
> When I was a broke teenager, I pirated a lot of software, games and music I later paid for when I had enough money to do so.
I don't know, I feel like it depends on the culture as well, not just the amount of money someone has.
For example, I am at a point in my life where I can afford JetBrains licenses (actually their Ultimate pack with tools for all languages), so I buy them. Some people that I've talked with, while also apparently able to afford such tools, simply don't bother paying and prefer the pirated versions instead. They might look at the ~350 euro yearly price tag, consider that it's X% of their current month's salary and prefer free instead, even though it means putting themselves at risk (sometimes). In other words, they just don't care.
I can pretty much say the same about Windows installs that many are running on their computers. Given that buying Windows might be a non-insignificant part of their income, they just won't and instead might pay 20 euros or something to someone who can give them an install that just works. They don't care about copyright, or the ethical aspects, they just want the shiny thing.
My income has gone up in the past few years to a point where I'm comfortable, but I definitely can understand their point of view, even if it's unethical, at least given how life can be in my country (Latvia, though the same applies to many other economies around the world). Heck, in regards to entertainment I never buy those new AAA "full priced" games and just not play them if I can't find them on discount/sale until a few years pass and they're cheaper then, though I've heard that shady game key reseller sites are also popular here.
Here, the average annual disposable income per capita per year was around 11 thousand euros in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267688/latvia-average-i...
Edit: actually, my country might be a bit of a negative example in particular, not sure why: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in...
> According to the MUSO anti-piracy analytics website, 46.3% of Latvians use the web to access illegal content, followed by Bulgaria (27.4%) and Lithuania (24.5%).
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#175Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…
When I was working on video game cartridges, I discovered that one of my neighbors in my apartment building was a prolific pirate. I introduced myself and we had some fun chats. The Atari 800 cartridge address range could be populated with RAM, and cartridge images simply copied to RAM and run. Copy protection techniques usually involved figuring out sneaky ways to write to that address range (which would crash an im…
These days the companies won and modern game DRM often doesn’t get cracked for the first year if at all.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#176Here's the standard playbook for dealing with this: - Let hobbyists and tiny companies pirate your software. You don't have to encourage it, but you can still turn a blind eye. They weren't going to pay you anyways, and this is a good way to get people familiar with your products. - Ruthlessly go after mid-large sized companies if you find their employees pirating your software. They have money to pay, and will be ha…
The alternative playbook is to develop a subscription based web service where the user can’t pirate your code because they don’t have access to it.
“Crack” gmail or ChatGPT if you can.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#177Here's the standard playbook for dealing with this: - Let hobbyists and tiny companies pirate your software. You don't have to encourage it, but you can still turn a blind eye. They weren't going to pay you anyways, and this is a good way to get people familiar with your products. - Ruthlessly go after mid-large sized companies if you find their employees pirating your software. They have money to pay, and will be ha…
This is what I've referred to in other contexts as the "Photoshop strategy". Literally everyone I knew growing up had pirated copies of Photoshop, but they wouldn't have used it without first pirating it, and they all grew up to take those Photoshop skills into respectable contexts where their employer was happy to pay Adobe exorbitant costs to stay legal, since Photoshop became such a fundamental part of their product development pipeline.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have implemented something similar. The most obvious way to crack our software will trigger certain bug. Whenever people report that bug I feel a little joy
> Whenever people report that bug I feel a little joy I hope you are super duper 100% sure the bug can’t happen otherwise. I would hate to be your paying costumer and ignored because your drm system is buggy.
Yes. 100% super duper sure.
It's something along the lines of: Pi+=2 in one place of the code. And Pi += 1.1415 somewhere else. And both are guaranteed to run at the start of the program so that Pi=3.1415
However one of those lines is hidden in a part of the code that the most obvious crack is going to remove.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was working on video game cartridges, I discovered that one of my neighbors in my apartment building was a prolific pirate. I introduced myself and we had some fun chats. The Atari 800 cartridge address range could be populated with RAM, and cartridge images simply copied to RAM and run. Copy protection techniques usually involved figuring out sneaky ways to write to that address range (which would crash an im…
These days the companies won and modern game DRM often doesn’t get cracked for the first year if at all.
Steam seems to have significantly reduced the market for pirated games. Streaming did that for movies for a while, until every single production company decided start their own.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#180Focus on pro consumer features by adding more features to create an updated release for which people want to stay current.
And make them recrack the latest version by changing the function which accepts serials, etc.
Note: As others have mentioned, it's going to be tough to win the arms race against someone with defeating your checks. So drive consumers to want the real thing by providing a value add.