On the page was complete and detailed instructions on how to crack it yourself using a hex editor or decompiler (or whatever!). Except, he said as you read down, the way the author explained it really highlighted how much effort he put into making it, and at the bottom copy saying something like "we hope this was useful and avoids you using a crack which might damage your machine, we also hope you realise the effort that goes into making software and will consider paying just $xx dollars which goes towards feeding my family and making more software".

Friend was so impressed he just got out his card and bought it.

TL;DR - They embraced the piracy / understood those that won't pay never will, those that may can be persuaded, so made something educational and thoughtful out of it.

Hope you figure it out!

The software is on GitHub (https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual) and you can compile it yourself and, thus, remove the "you gotta pay" checks and such. If you can do that you are free to do that... or you can just pay for it and don't have to bother. It's not crazy expensive ($5.99), but I decided to go for the former just because it was more fun to me. If I had used his software for much longer and more often, I'd have eventually paid for it, I suppose.

But if the official author of the plugin gives it for free it sends a weird message to paying customers, no ?

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.

Getting a large corporation to buy software from you is another matter. I tried to push my IT dept to buy licenses for libraries I liked, even with a modest cost, unsuccessfully.

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 the semantic versioning, so releases look like 67.0, 67.1, 68.0, etc. Since the barrier to upgrade the application is virtual nothing (free, click of a button), almost everyone updates. If you're a paid customer, your plugins will also be updated, but if you aren't, now none of your plugins work. 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. This requires lots of coordination from pirates, which has not happened yet. If an individual begins regularly releasing updated versions of the software, I can simply ban their user account which was used to purchase the plugins.

I imagine this can't work for your purposes since you have a single, standalone, polished application, but hopefully this could help others.

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.

FTFY

These kinds of plugins are for the development shop that makes the product, reuse across their product portfolio, and managing custom adaptations of the software for their specific customers.

Breaking APIs in this context is just like "breaking" any other internal API, as bother the caller and callee are upgraded and deployed together.

Don't underestimate the lengths some of them will go to.

(Former teenage software cracker; I had way more free time than I did money.)

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.

For that situation, consider adding an FAQ or a page on your website encouraging people to email you and ask for a free or discounted copy if they really can't afford it.

Don't make it too easy - you'll get a few whose entire request is "give me free copy" and threaten you when you don't. Don't help people who threaten you or don't show you respect.

But if you get someone who gives a short story about their current situation and either asks for a discount ("I want to at least pay what I can afford") or suggests they'll pay you back (or Pay It Forward) when they're back on their feet - those are the people you want to help. Bonus points if they include how your software will help make their life better.

Do keep in mind that some of those people will have high support demands, so factor that into your software pricing. You'll need your paying customers to subsidize the support cost.

If you try this, you'll find that some people aren't genuine. They'll say price is the reason they pirate, but if you offer them a free copy, they'll complain you didn't offer the free copy in the exact way that they desire (and "want to know what you're gonna do about it"). Ignore those people, they will never be satisfied. Literally ignore - if you engage them you'll make yourself angry & sad and it will ruin your productivity.

Above all, focus on your actual customers. Focus on the 1% of people who love what you make and are happy to support you.

  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. 

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 have more people using it regardless of whether they pay you because they can convert others into future sales and grow your market.

Software and its markets vary greatly, so it's hard to give a strategy that works for all software, but I've seen one model be fairly successful over time: basically using a subset of users to subsidize the rest of users. Find out who's deriving the most value from your product and get them to pay you, rather than trying to scrape an equal amount from everyone. This can be done many different ways, but are most commonly done with feature gating or providing external services. The idea is that if your software is more available, more people have the opportunity of deriving value from it and ultimately end up paying you.

One thing I've seen that generated a lot of good will in me was a company that said "if you can't afford a license, email us". Depending on the margins you have and the software you make, that could work for you as a way to communicate with your users.

Same here. I started learning how to crack software as a teenager (early 90s) because I was running a BBS and wanted to offer door games but I didn't have the money to pay for them.

I did, however, have plenty of free time, which I used to teach myself some assembly, how to use SoftICE (for DOS), and how to write "patchers" in Turbo Pascal and, later, C.

Now, I use Linux on my (primary) workstation and laptops so it's all free software (with a few exceptions; i.e. VMware Workstation). I also have a MacBook Pro (that I rarely use) with lots of commercial software on it and it has all been bought and paid for myself. (Today, I have more spare money and less free time!)

Oh, are you equating copyright violation with major theft, murder and associated felonies so heinous that there is actually a separate body of international law to address it? Please don't do that.

Unless you are already a market leader, copyright violation is largely equivalent to an unpaid, unauthorized marketing issue. Your problem is to convert those non-paying users into paying users.

Policy:

1. Make it so inconvenient to use your software without paying for it that they decide to pay you. This is the "stick" option: you hit them with a stick until they either go away or pay.

2. Make it so easy and useful to pay for your software that they decide to pay you. This is the "carrot" option: you dangle something good in front of them until they willingly walk towards it.

Every method falls into one of those two policy groups. Think about which policy you want to use before you start making changes.

If you decide to make your software open source, you are likely to stop making money at it by selling it. However, you can still make money by consulting -- you are the world's foremost expert on this software, after all.

And java shouldn't be called java, because it's not an island; and cache shouldn't be called cache, because it's not a hidden collection of supplies; and a mouse shouldn't be called a mouse because it's not a small rodent; and bluetooth shouldn't be called bluetooth, because it's not a discoloured tooth...

The battle over the 'real meaning of the word 'piracy'' was lost a very long time ago.

The term "software pirate" was invented by software pirates.

Don't be a pirate. If you have to be, be an unauthorized copier.

In the meantime, think about whether you want to use carrot strategies or stick strategies.

I think that ship has sailed.

If you want to equate murder, rape and plundering from and often enslaving strangers with the concept of unauthorized copying, then that's your prerogative. I won't judge, but I'll still call it either unauthorized copying or just sharing.

I certainly don't equate those things. But words have different meanings in different contexts.

One of my favourite games from way back when was Sid Meier's Pirates!, so I might be coloured by that. And yes, it was pirated.

   If you name copyright violation as piracy

And why not a carrot AND stick? Think Steam DRM. Unobtrusive to legitimate users but slows down casual pirates. And is linked to an easy way to pay for the software.

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

[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20120222/91144/Pir...

I sell a Mac app, which performs periodic update checks, so I can estimate how many users I have. The update checks also contain info about whether the product is licensed, and whether the code signature is valid. I assume that copies of the app that say they are licensed but don't have a valid code signature are cracked.

Here are my numbers from July:

13301 trial users

4934 paid users

367 pirates

If I look at these numbers, I don't see why I should bother doing anything about pirates. Any effort spent on convincing pirates to pay is better spent on convincing trial users!

(PS: the update check can be disabled, and I don't know how many people disable it, so the above numbers are rough estimates at best. Also, invalid code signatures might be caused by things other than piracy eg. software bugs)

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

Have you heard of Google or Facebook's origins? They were both in that window and pretty significant. Valve, LinkedIn and Netflix have also done okay...

   change the backend to an API

MMOs have more consistent cash flows than regular games which means the developers can work on content updates in the future. Regular games will have the majority of their sales within the first month then quickly taper off. This is unrelated to copyright infringement. In a peer to peer architecture cheating is a far bigger concern than copyright infringement.

By the way the reason why ingame transactions in freemium games work is because there is no spending limit which means a small rich minority of players ends up spending multiple thousand dollars on the game to compete with other players.

If you give the crack yourself, as suggested by another reader, the buyers of your software might feel cheated.

Now if you insist on trying to help the users who cannot afford your software, then do what MS did in the 90’s. Allow 123-4567890 to be entered as a product key and leak that to the crack websites :)

PS: my teen self says thank you MS

> 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.

It sounds like you'd like to have these customers as actual customers and if it's your thesis that those who pirate the software aren't professional consider licensing.

1. Have a low-cost, or "pay what you want" license model, for non-comercial use.

2. Have a free-for-students license. Only for education use.

3. Offer upgrade pricing spiffs to convert from the free/low tier to the pro-tier.

4. Consider a subscription approach. I would never pay the full price for Photoshop/Lightroom, but the Adobe Creative Cloud for Photographers is $9.99 a month, which is the right price for my needs.

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.

Personally I really like the idea above of a slightly feature restricted, free for non commercial use version. This had the benefit of people getting used to it at home, then potentially bringing it to the workplace (where they can pay for it)

You assume that they would buy in in the first place. I would not spend a penny on 95% stuff I pirated. Most of the stuff was a one time thing, like game was too boring (I would request a refund), game had too high requrements, so I couldn't even start an episode, music was not interesting after literally one song from whole discography etc.

> in the FAQ and try to not show it if I detect the software is not cracked ?

Things have FAQ? I've never seen them.

>What if I distribute the pirated version myself

I remember this coll guy https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2mjxde/develo...

>I have faith that some of my pirate users can become my clients one day

I've pirated more than 1k of PC games, my steam account has 97 tites right now, and there is also GOG.

Try to make your stuff easy to reach, steam, gog, https://itch.io/app, try to build hype around your game, it's easy now no reddit in /r/gaming show some cool/funny scene from the game, make announcement on /r/linux_gaming that game is available from first day, etc.

  You assume that they would buy in in the first place

I'm not selling a game but a very useful productivity tool. But yeah I'll try to build 'hype' anyway thanks :)

I'm definitely going to do soon the "How to Crack MyProduct Without Virus !" page and I'll think about changing the trial and the features it gives.

A good long term solution would be to develop a SaaS business around the product and if I find a way to mix that business model with open source that would be even better (my product could be faster being GPL).

The configuration is a one-time thing, the daily use is simple, so this is no problem for usability. And the software is a niche application with very few potential and real customers.

I run a few SaaS products and make a fairly good living. People can use my software as much as they like, provided they pay, and provided it's running on one of my machines.

So long as they never get their hands on a copy of the thing, there's nothing for them to copy.

Maybe the time has come to slowly shift the meaning...

Example: Piracy gives me access to all features. Paying it gives me a cute bunny doll mascot from the vendor :D

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 generating new versions, rather than simply hosting a single file.

If you mean the co-opted meaning of the word that the RIAA/MPAA managed to acclimate Americans to a few generations ago, I'd use either a SAAS model or a subscription/membership model where customers get more and more value over time instead of just a one-off product.

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?

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

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, please stop to carefully think through why you believe sharing digital files is stealing but borrowing a book from a library or buying a used video game or movie is not. None of those things give ANY proceeds to the authors or creators, either, and the authors have no choice in that matter either. Yet society deems that arbitrarily acceptable.

   but I still pirate most major creative software 

   Yet society deems that arbitrarily acceptable

As for society being ok, yes and no. Nobody attacks me about it but I know plennnnnty of people who will refuse to budge on the idea that it's immoral and wrong.

If a creator stopped making software you pirated because it wasn't sustainable would you feel guilt?

And someone originally bought the pirated software, too, which they then went on to share with others....just like a library. So what, again, is the difference?

No, of course I wouldn't feel guilt. Do you feel guilt when you buy things secondhand or borrow books from libraries? You're not benefiting the creator and you're shortchanging the creator of the cost of purchase because you don't want to pay full price for a new copy. What's the difference?

> Presumably an author can pick a publisher that does or doesn't distribute to libraries.

As if a library is legally required to only carry books with the publisher's permission?

Also buying second hand is completely different as one second hand DVD can't be shared amongst millions of people. It's a completely different scale...

Was also interested to read about the PLR

https://www.plr.uk.com/allAboutPlr/whatIsPlr.htm

I can confirm this. One of the 'cracks' for one of my programs was a license code obtained by someone using a stolen credit card. No attempt to actually crack & keygen the software. And there's genuine theft there, as payment processors keep the transaction fee after the refund, and there's a $25 penalty fine for a chargeback. Plus the owner of the credit card temporarily gets their card locked until it's replaced, etc.

So if you've ever used warez from Team OXiDE, keep in mind that some of that software was obtained via actual fraud.

> Was also interested to read about the PLR

To save people a click: "Public Lending Right (PLR) is the right for authors to receive payment for the loans of their books by public libraries."

Australia has a similar Public Lending Right as well. In return for allowing their books to be available in libraries, authors receive a subscription payment from those libraries:

https://www.arts.gov.au/funding-and-support/lending-rights

I grew up on a 100% pirated diet. I now develop software for a living.

I'd be an absolute hypocrite to pirate commercial software when I myself demand to be paid for my commercial efforts.

You won't see me running any pirated software at all.

Of course, given the choice and options we have today, in practice it means I'm running much less commercial software, and depend almost entirely on open source software.

For that software I try to "pay" by contributing back when I can and it feels natural.

Now? I've been paying for Google play music and Netflix since they've been available in my country.

I pay for my IDE

I have a steam library so large that I'll never be able to play everything

Well I used to pirate 100% when I was a student but now I have money to spend, I purchase things legally. I cant even remember the last time I opened a torrent client.

I also pirated a lot of films. I now subscribe to 2 streaming services, and search them and BBC iPlayer before pirating anything now as it’s more convenient.

I'm one of them and converted to paying when I didn't need a full cable package just to watch it.

   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

   Have you got a forum to engage your
   customers with directly? 

Not checking the serial or user, this can be (and mostly is) suppressed by a crack.

But an important proprietary function that can't be to easily emulate by a crack and your software can't fully work without. Nowadays there is no more internet access limitations for stuff like that (that's why SaaS is booming for years).

And this could be the first step to your full online version.

I've already done software like that. Still don't know what's yours, but in our case, it was for kiosks and access points. All the UI was online (so if the client ask for UI change, it's automatically updated on every kiosks or access points), and the hardware related code was on the C# software installed (using a scanner, a barcode reader, printing stuff, etc...)

Of course it's pretty specific, but as we have to create a key for every licence, you can't have two running at the same time, so no crack.

We had bad experience, as a guy to which we sold a licence of the first version of our soft (some nearly 20 years ago), where we just checked if the serial was ok, installed it on multiple places and we found out totally randomly, 2 or 3 years later !

If someone doesn't want to pay they should be able to get the content for free, then they can decide if you deserve to be paid.

---

That content above seems to be very popular sentiment on HN and other techy places. I don't understand that since all you hurt are people like the author of this post.

The tech community needs to get its act together and decide to support intellectual property rights because as tech people that's all we have.

And don't think this only applies to proprietary software. MIT, GPL, Apache, etc are all licenses and are all capable of just as much abuse as your traditional EULA.

You can't begin to understand it, if you don't understand the 'sentiment' you describe in the first place.

Nobody is saying that it is OK to steal someone's work and not pay them for it. The argument against DRM is usually that:

1. I shouldn't, as a paying customer, be required to purchase multiple times just to consume on a different platform, this increases piracy.

2. You shouldn't charge prices that your customers can't afford to pay, increases piracy.

3. DRM punishes paying customers while pirates get a better (unrestricted) version anyway, so where's the incentive to not pirate?

...and many more.

Notice how none of these endorse piracy as a good thing, merely point out that these factors lead to it.

However, there are those who make a special effort to pirate the works of people who promote DRM. The idea is that these people have no right to interfere with how one manipulates the bits on their machine. "They think they can control me, so fuck them"

Give up your control. Information wants to be free. Stop fighting it.

As a previous comment alludes, much of your pirates are people who won't ever convert anyway.