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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?

#51

Post by ttoinou »

Cozumel wrote: post #30
ttoinou wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the answer ! I like the lite idea, although too late for you now, is to only sell an online hosted version of your software, they can't crack what they don't have access too I've thought about it and it's an excellent solution because I could link the software to a website with a subscription based business model. And my software could be better with internet / community feature inside it ! But it's for mi…

An approach I took in your situation was to actually sign up to the forums, I became moderator there and then didn't allow anyone to share my stuff! The flip side though is you still have to allow people to share other peoples stuff so morally it's a grey area. Whatever you choose though, good luck!

Lol nice. I'm just going to try to answers theirs question that's all.

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

#52

Post by milankragujevic »

If your software is useful, and if you're a small company / one man show, I will pay for it, even if I barely have any money, or if I have lots of money. But the key for me is not having a really useless and stupid and intrusive anti-piracy mechanism, as that usually makes me go away from that software. Example of that are games like Kerbal Space Program that are useful, fun, and have no anti-piracy mechanism. I paid for it. And the other example is pretty much any huge game like GTA V, that I bought my brother as a gift but it often stops working and has to be reinstalled because it detects some tampering or something like that, it's from Steam BTW.

I'd also recommend that you DON'T offload processing to a server, as that will prevent people with spotty Internet (like me) or those in special circumstances / behind firewalls from using it properly, and also has data security issues.

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

#53

Post by iamben »

chx wrote: post #47
ttoinou wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear ya. Someone once told me (I don't sell software/music/whatever so have no idea if this is true) - for every 5 people, 2 will always pay, 1 will always pirate, and the 2 will buy if given good reason (be that price point, sales pitch, ease, guilt, etc.).

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

#54

Post by mynegation »

ttoinou wrote: post #23
anfractuosity wrote: post #11

Could you 'watermark' the program for each user (although that wouldn't be trivial), and mention noticeably that the software is watermarked. Not sure if that would really dissuade anyone leaking/cracking it though, but it may possibly help determine potentially where the leak/crack came from. There are probably many reasons why watermarking isn't worthwhile though, as you'd then need to have an 'online' system for g…

Good idea for an unlimited trial but it's for videos, so watermarking would be a performance sink.

I don't think GP meant watermarking the video, only software binary itself.

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

#55

Post by warrenm »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #13
warrenm wrote: post #9

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.

A note on your second comment, that is a possible consideration, but remember that some people will simply never buy software, so there will always be someone that cracks it. Many people either have fundamentally different opinions on whether or not software should cost money or they're too poor to be able to afford it when they can get it free.

That's my first point: if they wouldn't have bought it anyway, you've lost nothing

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

#56

Post by ttoinou »

iamben wrote: post #46
ttoinou wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well one "advantage" of having an official crack web page is to give the software cracked without virus.

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

#57

Post by ttoinou »

milankragujevic wrote: post #52

If your software is useful, and if you're a small company / one man show, I will pay for it, even if I barely have any money, or if I have lots of money. But the key for me is not having a really useless and stupid and intrusive anti-piracy mechanism, as that usually makes me go away from that software. Example of that are games like Kerbal Space Program that are useful, fun, and have no anti-piracy mechanism. I paid…

Would a warning about piracy in the FAQ be too much for you as a paying customer ?

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

#58

Post by ttoinou »

balls187 wrote: post #37

> 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. > 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 like the free for non commercial use solution, like SmartGit.

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

#59

Post by runeks »

vortico wrote: post #10

My company deals with piracy in the following technical way, and it works well enough for potential buyers to stay buyers. I release software binaries often, say every two weeks, and the software self-updates with permission from the user. The main application software is free, while the plugins (the real meat of the software) are purchased individually. When the application updates, the plugins also update. I use th…

> If you want to release your set of plugins to the world, pirates will have to match the versions of those plugins to the versions of their application, and if there are other plugins in the internet, they will also have to match.

Are you relying on constantly making breaking changes to the plugin API for this to work? Otherwise, it may just be the case that pirates haven’t figured out that they need to disable the version checking-part of your app. It sounds a bit like security through obscurity, unless I’m missing something.

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

#60

Post by vortico »

ttoinou wrote: post #28
vortico wrote: post #10

My company deals with piracy in the following technical way, and it works well enough for potential buyers to stay buyers. I release software binaries often, say every two weeks, and the software self-updates with permission from the user. The main application software is free, while the plugins (the real meat of the software) are purchased individually. When the application updates, the plugins also update. I use th…

Why do your plugins need also to update ? There's a lot of changes in the API ?

The ABI is incompatible between different versions.
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