Hi, We had the same problem - keygens, cracks and serialz for our products. Unlike other responses we did not see a sales increase - but a sales decrease of 25-30%. We sell enough a day for the numbers to be quite quantifiable. So much so that within a week we can tell something is out there in the wild. The order of importance (for treatment) is: 1) Keygens - the worst of the worst because you have to change the keygen algorithm in future versions. 2) cracks - that is loaders and the like where they distribute the cracked version executable. The only known method we have is to contact the torrent sites/rapidshare for removal. They are usually quite accommodating (I think after the piratebay jailing) 3) serialz - the easiest to get rid by releasing a new version and including the stolen keys in the exe.
I am not sure why we see a decrease in sales whereas others see an increase, but it might be due our programs being mostly "reactive", that is customers only look (and hopefully find) us when they need our functionality. Sales might go up if the product is proactive - that is someone doesn't know they need until they use it. I think in the latter case people might use a pirated version and then buy if they find it useful, whereas for reactive products someone needs the product "now" and if they can't find an easy crack then they grudgingly buy it (given our number we suspect 25% of buyers are in the grudging category, and would use the pirated version if easily available). And for those that think pirates wouldn't pay anyway - well that doesn't mean I want them to use our programs that I spent years working on for free - they can go look elsewhere. If you have a good product people will gravitate to yours and the non-payers can settle for second best. Also I don't think people should be happy with the "On the bright side, your application is popular enough for someone to take the time to crack it. :)". Really crackers just troll the net looking for apps they can crack (for some sort of "fame") - I don't think they give a rats what some programs do or who made them. There are cookie-cutter crackers (ones that use other peoples tools, and don't really understand reverse engineering code that well) looking on download.com and other download sites just waiting for some weakly protected product that they can "cut" and add to their list of triumphs. The best strategy to date (for us) is to constantly release - in our case we are always getting feature requests and bug fixes, and it turns out that we release every 2-4 weeks. That way the serialz stop working, and the crackz soon become out of date (and we find most people want to the latest version). We change the fundamental protection every major version so that stops the keygens - and sometimes do silent protection changes that don't affect old keys only newly created ones (this stops keygens for about 2 months on average, although we once got an entire years once). We once left updating our main program for 6 months - big, big mistake. Updating your software not only stops pirates but also says "we are supporting and improving our product continually" to the public. Someone once said you are either climbing or sliding. Hope that helps. Brett __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4923 (20100307) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com
