[AndrewStephens]

I was a junior developer on a heavily used utility that was frequently pirated. The company tried a few strategies to deal with this but one of the best was incredibly sneaky.

This was before validating license keys over the internet was really possible so a lot of people just used our application with a key from a public cracking site. Of course, we also knew about this list of cracked keys and our application would pretend to accept them. But if you actually tried to use the application, it would appear to be doing something for several minutes but fail with a mysterious error inviting the user to submit a log file to support.

Of course, the log file was secretly marked to indicate that it had come from a pirated copy and the customer would get a polite call from the sales team.

It worked out pretty well, a lot of customers didn't know they were using pirated software (or so they claimed; somewhat plausible given the nature of the utility) and were happy to pay and the sales team got a lot of solid leads. Evil vanquished, good prevailed, and I got paid.