The cracked copy is the start of your sales funnel, literally don't fight it, you're doing yourself a disservice.
Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
191–200 of 297 posts
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#192Here'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…
How do you correlate the installation with the company if it's pirated, for going after mid/large sized companies? Phone home and reverse IP lookup?
> Phone home and reverse IP lookup
Pretty much. You can add more data points – email address used to sign up, whether the IP address matches a company's network, whether their machine is connected to a corporate domain.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#193Congratulations! 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 is a third option which I'm surprised no one has mentioned so far: Ignore them. First, people or companies using the cracked version of your software were never going to buy it. These people do not pay for software, and nothing you do will convince them to pay for it. Secondly, whatever measures you put in place to combat the cracked versions will potentially have a negative impact on your actual paying users -…
It was called "the WordStar effect" in the 80s. Your marginal loss to pirates is nothing compared to the incremental effect of becoming a standard.
Not always effective for all applications though.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#194Congratulations! 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…
‘But above all, make sure not to confuse a "pirated copy" with a "lost sale". In 99% of cases, the Venn diagram of those has very little overlapping area.’
The non-overlapping are is likely non-trivial. There are surprising many shops that use professional software for client projects, could afford the license, but that prefer pirated copy to paying actual license fee.
Ofc persecuting non-professional users is pointless. Persecuting professional users in a smart way can lead to license sales.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#195Congratulations! 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…
>But above all, make sure not to confuse a "pirated copy" with a "lost sale". In 99% of cases, the Venn diagram of those has very little overlapping area. Very true. If they were never going to pay anyway, you haven't lost anything if they use a crack. It still irks though!
Yeah basically. Not only that, but, for all of the most expensive software I use, I used a pirated version first for months to ~ 1 year first. Once I really got a feel for it, if it provided value to me, I have pretty much paid for it everytime. And no, a 30-day trial doesn't cut it for evaluation. If I used the software enough to where a 30-day trial would have been enough to test it properly, the value proposition would have already been there to just buy it. Software trials should be based on hours used or something, and the eval periods are almost always too stingy.
Instead, the value proposition to switching to paid became once it had established value to me, and I could benefit from the reduced exposure risk of running malware in the cracked version, and possibly get updates if they affected major things like stability, or new tool-sets or access to online data that was useful.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#196Well I too like money. It feels nice. Lovely texture too. I suppose this is a matter for legal.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#197This might not be appropriate for your case, but piracy can be considered a form of differential pricing.
Student movie tickets are cheaper, even though the seat taken is the same. This is done so students will spend some money instead of none, without reducing the price that other segments will pay.
Although you get no revenue from piracy, you do get people trained on the software, integrated into their workflow and infrastructure, advertising and promotion - it helps your product become the standard. They may later become paying customers. It denies oxygen to competitors.
Apparently, adobe turns a blind eye to piracy of photoshop, for reasons like these.
But to repeat: this mightn't be appropriate for your case. Are there such network effects? Would you benefit from them, over time? Is there some trigger for actual purchase?
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#198I'll throw my hat in the "mostly just ignore it" camp. I work for a small software company and we have basic license key protection stuff, but our philosophy is "someone who is pirating the software probably isn't someone we want to bother with as a customer anyway."
Only a small percentage of people who pirate it are likely to be paying customers if they couldn't pirate it. So the real revenue loss is likely minimal. (Without know more about what the software does it's hard to make generalizations about the target market, though.) And you never know when someone who was able to use/learn the software by pirating it will be in a position to turn around and recommend to their employers or friends your product and those entities will actually buy it.
If there's a specific site or forum online where the crack is being distributed, you can always at least just send a DMCA takedown notice, but overall it's probably not worth spending much time or money worrying about it unless you have real data showing significant missed revenue opportunities (which is at most a tiny fraction of the number of people who pirate the software).
If you can update future versions of the software to not be cracked by the existing mechanism, BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF CAUSING HASSLE FOR REAL CUSTOMERS WHO ARE UPGRADING, you could do that too.
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#199One trick I’ve learned from the mobile game world is to make sure your localization files are separate resources — don’t compile them in. They way, when your game is first cracked, you’ll get a pretty decent Russian translation immediately that you can, with no moral concerns, “steal” back for your next update — and within only a few weeks you’ll have a pretty rich set of languages floating around for your distributi…
This is one of the funniest ideas I've ever seen on HN. Clever.
The best part is that while it's technically illegal (you didn't pay for rights to the translations), they're never going to reveal who they are to come after you (since they don't have the rights to distribute their translation).
Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
#200Congratulations! 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…
I like the special page suggestion. Humanizing the software is a great way to get people to pay for it if they have the means. And if they don't, then you're doing some good in the world (hopefully) by giving it away. Maybe at some point in the future they'll pay it forward or back.