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I find your posts fascinating - after working in the content industry for awhile, it's very easy to see (and confirmed with repeated studies) that DRM doesn't significantly affect or prevent piracy. Not to mention that there's a constant stream of more and more anti-customer requests coming from content provider lawyers. Requests that would make your head spin at just how fundamentaly evil they are (most of them... for now... can be pushed back). Remember, those dudes had the idea to attempt to make physical media that rot away after few days of use.

You are hugely, hugely wrong in the basic premise that actual reality of piracy is something that even comes close to reasoning for people who put these anti consumer practices in.

Use your brain - DRM allows them to increase profits even without piracy (by taking away consumer rights like second sale doctrine and ability to share content with your friends and family). You're seriously implying it's a bit of piracy that's making them say "yes, let's make sure everyone buys their own copy of the movie"? Do you think copyright protection laws were extended to 70 years+death of the authors because there were too many pirates copying Mickey movies?

> a bit of piracy

Don't know about other content industry, but at least in video games, "a bit of" and "piracy" are oxymoron. Any semi-popular game has a significant number of pirated copy players.

Example: World of Goo claims 90% of players play pirated copies.[1] This is a game distributed without DRM and the price isn't high ($15 and region-based). 90% piracy rate is how customers respond to no DRM.

[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy

> we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%

Did they account for dynamic IPs? If not that number is way off.

Note that those % numbers don't convert into sales or profits. Those are just the biggest numbers found to defend DRM.

(Similarly how being able to share a BluRay with your family doesn't lose the content industry N sales of discs.)

This issue is a lot more nuanced than reading some skewed stats and declaring that it's a problem.

The core issue is that this is a hugely emotional issue - the content industry (and artists of course) are constantly playing the "oh poor us, everyone is stealing, those criminals!" note to make pirates look bad... while in the same sentence establishing outright abusive DRM practices and trying to extract maximum money of every single shmuck that actually bought their content legally.

DRM has a massive negative effect on legitimate consumers - instead of quoting "90% piracy that", instead think about just how much of that piracy ACTUALLY hurts anyone and how much the attempt to fight it ACTUALLY hurts people who legitimately pay for their content and hardware.

Have a look at http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy

<large number>% of copies are pirated, but only <tiny number>% of players pirate, it is simply that (some of) those that do pirate will tend to pirate a whole lot more games. Meaning that that 90% piracy rate means e.g. 5% lost sales.

And if you follow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 then 90% piracy rate could also mean 5% extra sales.

The price is quite high for a jobless minor, of which most gamers are.

Theoretically, you would be right. However, it did reach the state of limiting ownership when the providers started changing the terms of service making the copy you have not entirely yours. Nothing forced them to do that except their own interests

Honest question: has your implementation of copy protection increased your revenue and decreased your support request by an appreciable amount?

And honest answer: yes. People that would otherwise crack the app, still would not buy the app at my price, but started asking for discounts. Some were also honest enough to tell me that they previously used a cracked version, others I recognize from cracking forums.

I'm happy to provide such discounts when people don't have the means to pay the whole price. I didn't build the app to get rich, I built it to help people get control of their monitor brightness, and I'm working towards that goal.

Sorry, I guess I must have missed something -- why would they crack it if it didn't have DRM already?

I was comparing anti-piracy measures with DRM, I don't have actual DRM in my app. I can't block users that really bought the app from using it (which is what DRM is notorious for).

But I do have a license verification for the Pro features (https://lunar.fyi/#pro), and that is what people are cracking in the app. I only added more protection around this verification.

And even then, why have DRM when you could simply request the user's invoice-number or license-ID in the support-ticket form?

> Just like I would not bother to buy and use a bike lock if people would not steal bikes in the first place. It's a bad analogy though, like all analogies are, since if I sell my bike I can't make it stop working for the buyer at a later time. But that's the big difference between digital and physical.

That's not why your analogy is wrong, especially because some connected electric bikes allow that just like smartphones do. Here is a rewriting that explains why you analogy is actually (very) wrong: "It's a really bad analogy though, since if someone steals my bike, I don't have it anymore, while “stealing” in the digital world consists in making a copy. But that's the big difference between digital and physical."

> since if I sell my bike I can't make it stop working for the buyer at a later time. But that's the big difference between digital and physical.

But that's the entire thing the article is about: That suddenly in the digital space, it seems to be not just normal but expected that vendors maintain control over a product even if it's sold.

> This could be regarded as DRM by some.

Indeed it is, and it shows the problems with that approach: As you say, even with the best of intentions, you can't guarantee that the DRM will only shut out illegitimate users: It might also deactivate legitimately bought apps if the licensing server has an issue or if at some point you don't have the resources to run it any longer. That makes a DRM-enabled digital product strictly worse than an analog one.

And that's if you're one of the good guys and don't get into any third party contract disputes, don't do any shady deals with user data and don't go crazy with subscriptions.

> But I would have never wasted time with this if people would not crack my app in the first place AND demand customer support and flood my dashboard with errors unrelated to the normal functioning of the app.

That sounds a bit like "I wouldn't have to put up this fence if people didn't keep jumping over it". What about permitting free usage but restricting support to paying customers?

    > What about permitting free usage but restricting support to paying customers?

I already provide a generous free version of my app, I can't see how pirating the Pro features, on which I spend an enormous amount of time, can be justified.

Restricting support is what I tried first, but it takes too much time and effort. Email is slow since I'm very often in a different timezone than the buyer. So increasing the back and forth messages for asking for the license, and then me having to go to a non-mobile friendly site to verify that license made the support emails pile up so much that I got burnt out in less than two weeks.

Asking for the license also upsets people that are already angry because they think my app bricked their monitor or something along those lines.

don't use a general email address for support.

use an online support tool that can only be accessed by people who have a license. possibly use a tool to verify the license before they can even contact you.

everyone else can post issues on github.

also, do you track names and email addresses of those who bought a license? then you can match up requests and reduce the amount of license verification that you need to do.