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Few would dispute that software companies lose money as a direct result of piracy.
The issue is how far the software company should go to prevent this.
On one hand, software piracy is theft. You can get as self-righteous as you feel you’re entitled to, but using a cracked, hacked or unlicensed piece of software is theft.
On the other hand, does it matter? You might argue that irrespective of how far you’re prepared to go to prevent piracy, it’s still going to happen.
As always, being the calm voice of reason that I am, I propose a common-sense approach.
When I go to bed each night I make sure all our ground-floor windows are closed, the doors are locked, and I activate an alarm system before going upstairs.
I don’t have bars on my windows, our moat isn’t filled with sulphuric acid, and instead of a roaming Rottweiler we have a house-rabbit.
Using some form of protection on your software is common sense, yet there’s a scale with reasonable on one side and off-putting on the other.
I know businesses whose policies will not allow them to buy software that has to be activated; not on ideological grounds, but based on practical concerns.
In general, the more difficult you make your software to crack, you more you impose on your buying customers, and the more you risk losing them.
Crack Tracker is one of those “why didn’t I think of it earlier” type of applications. You enter your software details, and it crawls some of the more popular and more dangerous parts of the warez world, creates a list of the download locations and sends DMCA take-down notices to the offending websites.
It obviously won’t stop people cracking your software, but it might make distributing the cracks more difficult.
Once you know the extent of the problem, you can then decide for yourself what to do about it. Personally I’d recommend spending more time on developing and marketing your software than chasing cracked versions, but the choice is yours.
