| I'm not a big fan of DRM and don't want to defend it, but your description is a bit incomplete. Those 10 determined people/pirates go off and put the cracked software (or the serials) up for download for the "not so determined" pirates who just want to download a cracked version (or serial) that works. Those don't have the skills (and willpower) to do the work needed to crack software. Those, however, aren't 10 people: the ratio of cracker to "not so determined pirate" is an important part of the puzzle. Perhaps 1000 people will get the cracked version. I don't know, but the 1-to-many relationship is quite obvious from a distribution system such as BT or Mega. I'm not trying to justify DRM (and certainly not what these guys have been up to), but your presentation makes it look like measures such as these are trying to fight a super-minority of folks (ie 10 out of 1000, or about 1%), when reality is most likely very different. I have an app on the Mac App Store (I won't spam you with the download link since it's irrelevant to the discussion and I'm not here to fish for downloads) with analytics that report that many "purchase attempts" fail with a strange error (ie not a cancellation by the user, not a problem reaching servers, etc), and I have no other choice but to imagine that these are from people who are trying to pirate my app. And it's nowhere near a 1% fraction. In my previous company, we'd have server side verification of receipts (per Apple rules), and about an hour after we'd release our software, we'd see a torrent of verification failures in our logs. Software piracy is quite widespread and is an issue that we shouldn't gloss over. Still, I wouldn't condone what these guys seem to have been doing. As a side comment on style, you could have made your point without saying "Vendor makes a shitty product" as there is no need to denigrate products that vendors make in such a generalized manner. You'll be taken more seriously if you can adopt a more balanced stance. |