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. There are other softwares, many of which are free or very affordable, that do 95%+ of what anything adobe or Waves does. their software was pirated obsessively because it was so good and so expensive, just like Waves $2,000 Mercury VST plugin suite. 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. The difference between calling what Adobe has on the market a monopoly and an actual monopoly is probably only technicalities at this point. Ignore them, and spend your time improving your product for your real users.Ī 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.īut 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.īusinesses buy the software because that is what the talent is trained on. ![]() Why would you inconvenience paying users to combat people who will never be paying users? Secondly, whatever measures you put in place to combat the cracked versions will potentially have a negative impact on your actual paying users - the real people you built the software for.Įxtra security measures or hoops to jump through extra validation or 'calls home.' - all extra things that can and will go wrong at some point for a real user. These people do not pay for software, and nothing you do will convince them to pay for it. There is a third option which I'm surprised no one has mentioned so far: Ignore them.įirst, people or companies using the cracked version of your software were never going to buy it. In 99% of cases, the Venn diagram of those has very little overlapping area. Of course, any such free keys don't come with support and display a prominent PIRATED VERSION notice in all window captions, printed outputs, et cetera, but you disclose all of that upfront and explain how that's a small price to pay.īut above all, make sure not to confuse a "pirated copy" with a "lost sale". On this page, put a human face on your pricing, explain the available discounts, and finally offer to supply a free registration key to anyone that truly wants it, so they don't have to download all kinds of shady binaries. Having some fun with it: make sure that a special page on your own site becomes the #1 search engine result for " crack" and similar. ![]() to at least suppress the cracks in most search results Ģ. If a distributor is unresponsive to both, DMCA Google, Bing, etc. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown, and if required, demanding such (with a DMCA notice or similar). While we'll always have some piracy, we'd like to keep it to a minimum.Ĭongratulations! 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.Īs to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other:ġ. I'm not entirely sure what other information would be helpful to provide, but I was wondering if anyone has run into this into the past, and how it was mitigated. It's clear to us why someone would crack our software, especially in lower income countries. We also provide free licenses to academics (with proof).įor context, we are a <15 person company where we all wear multiple hats and would like to continue providing great service, training and introducing features. A license costs a few thousand dollars, but we do regional pricing and bulk licenses for larger firms. We haven't done the most thorough search of how widespread the issue is, but we've estimated that it's about 1 user per day since the early half of 2022. Thankfully, our digital signatures are lost in the process, so that's reassuring. Specifically, the crack modifies some of our binaries to circumvent the activation process and allows bogus registration keys. ![]() Hi HN, I work for a small company and we've recently come across a version of our software that's been cracked.
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