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Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

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Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#221

Post by baud147258 »

addaon wrote: post #64

One 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…

I remember that a video game editor once released a collector edition of one of their titles, where the bundled OST was copied from a torrent (which had presumably been ripped from the standard edition); apparently the file names or metadata made the origin clear.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#222

Post by garganzol »

Piracy is a slow cat and mouse game. You, as a software manufacturer, do not have to panic. Instead, take your time and gradually fix the identified breaches.

Piracy is a compliment. Piracy is a form of free advertising. Your core customers will remain yours anyway. But you have to close the open breaches from time to time, gradually narrowing the attack surface. This will help you remain profitable.

You may need some tools to help you win that game. Obfuscators/protectors may be of some help. For instance, code virtualization is a pretty decent technique to deter most attacks of such kind.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#223

Post by lll-o-lll »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #209
lll-o-lll wrote: post #185

Ignore all the “piracy is actually wonderful” posts. Depending on your industry and product, you can lose a great deal of revenue from piracy. Circumventing licensing restrictions, “sharing” keys, customers pretending to be other customers to avoid paying support agreements, I’ve seen it all. Some people view avoiding paying you as a legitimate way to do business, and will happily do so if they can get away with it.…

> you can lose a great deal of revenue from piracy. This argument falls apart when you recognize that people that pirate weren't going to pay anyways. Piracy isn't a lost sale. A lack of piracy doesn't mean more sales, it means fewer users. Yes, I pirated Photoshop (Who didn't?), but if I couldn't pirate Photoshop, the alternative was never going to be buying Photoshop, it would be using GIMP or something else.

This just isn’t correct for much commercial and industrial software. Your customers are companies and they will avoid paying if they can get away with it. At least outside of the the US. Large swathes of Europe? Totally fine. India? China? Paying when you don’t have to would make you a fool!

When you make piracy hard enough, they will pay.

As a youth I pirated everything I could get my hands on, I’m not saying the photoshop example is invalid. I’m saying that if you are making software that’s used in a commercial setting, then piracy is a genuine problem that must be addressed.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#224

Post by clnq »

I've worked for a small company that also had one of its products widely pirated.

You indeed get some users from piracy. Some of our legitimate users asked for a Russian localization because they've seen images of our GUI in Russian online and bought it for that. In my estimation, the number of clients you get from piracy about equals the number of clients you lose to it. Many people online say that those who pirate would never be your users anyway, but some users with an inelastic need for your software will prefer piracy if it is easy.

Moving your features to your servers will significantly reduce piracy. Sometimes that is not feasible. In that case, you can issue cryptographic tokens from your server to perform operations on client machines. With enough effort, that can be worked around, but you can make it difficult enough so that the inelastic users will buy the software.

It depends on what kind of software you make, but you could also license it cheaply in some regions with a special licensing agreement. In exchange, you could ask your clients to advertise you in their products (logo in movie credits, splash screen in a video game), or you could add royalty payment terms.

You could also think about flipping your business model upside down and, rather than focusing on great customer experience, focusing on getting as many software units out there at a lower price. A price that may be more affordable for the lower income countries. Do you know your marginal revenues and marginal costs? What happens if you drop your marginal costs by 80% by moving your training online, slowing down customer support, and drop your price by 50%? What would be the % growth of units bought? Maybe, in the end, that could be a profitable transition and would eliminate piracy.

But overall... I don't know how many pirates you'll be able to convert. In my professional experience, sometimes you can get a bigger ROI on effort spent in other areas than fighting piracy. There is no silver bullet for piracy; otherwise, it would not exist.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#225

Post by paxys »

krisoft wrote: post #176
paxys wrote: post #115

Here'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.

Much of the corporate and industrial world runs on software that is sold in boxes and installed on the local machine. This is doubly true when you go beyond standard $10/mo consumer tools and in the range of thousands of dollars per license and beyond.

The move to the webapp model you describe is slowly happening, but it will be a very long time (if ever) before it can cover 100% of software use cases. Try telling someone in your accounting department they they have to use the web version of Excel moving forward and watch them quit on the spot.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#226

Post by huhtenberg »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #29

Congratulations! 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…

> Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable

In the vast majority of cases it doesn't mean that.

A lot of cracking is done for sport and to show off, especially when the protection is weak.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#227

Post by fragmede »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #220
fragmede wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, people or companies using the cracked version of your software were never going to buy it. I've heard this before but I'm not convinced this is actually true. Why? Because I use Netflix instead of torrent sites, and just accept the limitations of that format. Programs are tools vs of entertainment, but I don't know that the human psychology actually changes. A neat trick they did was to introduce downloading…

Not sure how your example of Netflix refutes the point being made? It’s exactly the point? Regardless this just goes to show that the problem can be mitigated by making the legitimate route less painful than the illegitimate one. I used to pirate most of my music collection but now I use Apple Music because the friction of maintaining the library across multiple devices is so much lower. Imposing restrictions and hoo…

Oh yeah okay I see what you're saying.

DarrenDev says there are no lost sales. However, I pay for Disney plus because I don't have access to invite-only torrent sites where the latest movies can be found, but I'd still like to watch them. If I had access to those torrent sites or someone's Plex, I could cancel Disney plus.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#228

Post by ops »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #219
ops wrote: post #97

Consider this: if the license costs 1,000, most people who are pirating it can’t afford it. Those pirates are learning how to use your software, and when they get a job at a relevant firm, what software are they going to want their new bosses to buy? I think Photoshop grew quite a bit due to something like this (before they went with the subscription nonsense)

> what software are they going to want their new bosses to buy? In many cases, none because they'll just keep pirating yours. Even if the company has a "don't pirate, we want to pay for it" policy, some employees will still do it! That's something to keep in mind. For some, piracy has become the default way to get software. You need to make it easier to buy than to pirate. I believe taking small credit card payments…

Where I work, it would absurd to choose piracy over waiting a few months for approval - simply because of the risk to one’s career. Is this not the case elsewhere?

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#229

Post by snuxoll »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #179
Gigachad wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost like Gabe Newell is right, piracy is first and foremost a service problem. There's some irony in things like Denuvo making games worse for legitimate users and creating new incentives to crack it, or players deferring purchases until it's either inevitably removed long after the launch window (where publishers are expecting the majority of purchases to happen).

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#230

Post by kazinator »

josephcsible wrote: post #94
schnebbau wrote: post #50

Add a trigger that doesn't fire until a few months after install (to prevent the cracker coming across it and patching it out) and then run rm -rf if it detects it is cracked. Optionally display a countdown from 10 and play an alarm sound before this happens for extra lols.

You could go to jail for doing this.

Probably not. The plaintiff would be making their case from a very poor position.

"I stole some software from a warez site, and months later, my system got wiped".

The burden of proof is entirely on their side, and illegal activity isn't a great starting point.

The time bomb could be hidden such that there is no traces of anything malicious in the software build. When the time comes, the software could contact a server from which it downloads a script to execute. The script does the job and then vaporizes.

The mechanism by which that script executes could be something that licensed versions of the program use regularly (e.g. fetch a harmless, update-related script), so the discovery of its existence would prove nothing.

Proving that it was your program could be very difficult.

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