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I agree with this, but I do think having pirate keys show up on ebay is a special case. I've dealt with this in businesses that expected Microsoft support but had windows and office keys bought off ebay that they believed were legitimate. End users often just think that $5 key is a special deal. It's worth sending whatever complaints you can to ebay.

> 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 as a feature. Now search results for "Netflix download" all talk about the built in feature as opposed to teaching how to rip the DRM off the downloaded file.

I think this is different in consumer and corporate markets. The tradeoff to expose a business to legal liability and security problems is not a good one for most businesses while it's usually acceptable (or isn't realized by) many consumers.

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 hoops to make your product harder to pirate is vastly inferior and in many cases entirely ineffective in than designing the product to be a superior experience to pirating it.

The ability to do so is going to vary wildly by the product itself, but that is the better way to achieve the goal.

There are people who will always pirate things, whether out of principle or out of economics. However there are plenty of people who would gladly cross the line if the legitimate route was significantly better, either by ease of use or design.

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.

I do have an access to an invite-only torrent site, but rarely download anything from there (mostly to keep my membership). Once in a while there's a movie that hard to come by online and I have to reach out to them (because of some stupid regional thing or whatnot). I'd say I download 2 movies per year. Convenience beats everything.

Look at Adobe, for instance.

A good portion of their user base got started using cracked copies of the software, as the price of something like the CS6 Master collection was well outside of the affordability of the average hobbyist.

But some of those teenage hobbyists grew up to go to college to expand on their Adobe tinkering to becoming professionals that sneer at people who use non-adobe products because of the price.

Businesses buy the software because that is what the talent is trained on. The difference between calling what Adobe has on the market a monopoly and an actual monopoly is probably only technicalities at this point.

Sure, most of this comes from the fact that their software really was the best of the best for the longest time, and their lead in technology and namesake is so far ahead of any of their competitors that it is laughable. their software was pirated obsessively because it was so good and so expensive, just like Waves $2,000 Mercury VST plugin suite.

There are other softwares, many of which are free or very affordable, that do 95%+ of what anything adobe or Waves does. But when you edit a photo with Gimp people will still instinctively say that you photoshopped it, and few people will ever care what plugins you used on an audio track if it's not autotune.

It's the same with IDA Pro.

Its completely unaffordable to the student or hobbyist, the "home edition" is too limited to be useful, so everyone starting out uses a cracked version because its been the de-facto industry standard tool since forever for reverse engineering.

Later when those people get jobs, they become another paying (through work) licensed user of IDA Pro.

What's slowly fucking IDA now is finally there are alternatives, the NSA open sourced Ghidra which can replace IDA to some extent - so smaller customers (who were always treated poorly anyway) are moving away from their product.

Adobe targets a very wide market, so it's okay to "let them learn on cracked PS" (like Microsoft did, actually), but in OP's case their case is obviously very narrow and this model, sadly, won't work..

You likely use Netflix because you can afford it.

Would you still pick Netflix over torrents if it cost €100/month?

When I was a young teenager I used to rip CDs from the local library (who could get almost any CD in a week if ordered).

Now I spent a fair chunk of money on both digital and physical (vinyl) supporting artists - because I can afford it.

When I was a young programmer, I used to buy CDs based on the songs I found using Napster, it was glorious being able to freely discover so many new artists/songs based on everyone else's collections.

Then they (the record companies) started suing their customers, and I stopped buying CDs. I've been listening to the same set of songs ever since, or stuff on youtube.

Never again will I feed that monster.

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.

I agree. Ignoring them is probably a good strategy. #2 in the list is too time consuming and has opportunity cost for the small team already wearing many hats.

Yes, exactly! This is IMHO the best answer. You'd also be amazed at how many people pirated photoshop while they were youths and/or students, and later paid for a legit copy when they had a real business need because it was what they knew and loved.

It's very bad economics to think of a pirated copy as a lost sale. In some cases the piracy helps drive sales!

I use cracked software until it is too useful or frustrating to use and the economics makes sense.

If you are making money from something or using it enough that you want support / reliability, pay for it and shame on you if you don't

Don't gimp your cracked stuff for the college kids and evening hacks just trying to see if they like something or if they can build its use into a business.

Distributing cracked software for free is one thing, but people trying to make money selling cracks or access to them ... if it were my software, that'd feel personal.

> These people do not pay for software, and nothing you do will convince them to pay for it.

I have pirated person when I was a poor student where it literally was money for food vs buying some software. I buy all my (commercial) software now that I can easily afford it and support multiple open source projects with donations. And the software houses, Bands and filmers who have seen the most of my money have been precisely the ones whose work I liked before.

The creators who have not been assholes about it (or even had some kind of humor in their response) are well remembered.

Sure there might be people who pirate everything out of principle, but my guess is that the majority will only do it if they can't help it any better.

> First, people or companies using the cracked version of your software were never going to buy it.

Or, they would never have bought it if unable to obtain a pirated copy, but now that they've tried it, may purchase. Admittedly this is more true of games than other software. When I compare my steam library to my pirated library, many of my favorite games are in the overlap: I tried them first, loved them, and then bought them.

Eh, you probably want to give company customers some notice it is a pirated one.

If there is no note whatsoever it's very easy to get to situation where user A starts to use it, pirates it, then just dumps it onto file share and tells others to use it.