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Ask HN: What do you think about piracy-thwarting measures in software?

2 points by law ↗ HN
There's an undeniable trade-off between the efficacy of protection, the time it takes to implement, and the impact it has on its users. You can create an absolutely piracy-proof system by installing your software on one computer, and having your customers each take turns flying to and using that computer as if it were some cheap carnival ride... or you can take the alternate approach by investing absolutely nothing in piracy-thwarting measures and relying on the honesty of your users to generate income.

What have you found is the best way to balance these factors? To what degree does the honesty and integrity of your market affect these factors? Is it even fair to make assumptions as to their honesty and integrity?

What I typically do in programs is provide a single authorization code that unlocks the program. It's something that can easily be cracked, but I do auth checks in pretty obscure areas of the program; it'd take at least an hour or two for a pro to crack. I also do some tricks with by adding "useless" instructions to the compiled form to create a de facto signature for each copy of the program that's downloaded. That way, if a copy leaks, I have at least some idea as to the origin of the leak.

3 comments

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HerraBRE
Generally speaking, I think users are better served by uncrippled products. Preferably open source. All the time spent building copy protection, is time NOT spent on useful features, tech support or bug-fixes.

But I'm a free software zealot and my own startup is not cash-flow positive yet, so what do I know? ;-)

law
There's something to be learned from that model, as well. What makes users want to pay for something instead of use a free/open alternative? From my experience, it's ease of use.

Users don't want to waste time, so they try to find the quickest way to the solution. It's immaterial whether that means pirating software instead of going through the hurdles of purchasing and registering it or buying software with free/open alternatives with a higher learning curve. It seems like the most important factor is the time it takes to solve a problem.

HerraBRE
I think generally people want solutions to whatever problems they have (boredom may be considered a problem, thus paying for entertainment).

How acute and urgent the problems are determines what people are willing to pay - whether they pay with money or with time invested depends on their situation. So yes, people trade money for the luxury of not having to learn how to use a complicated FOSS tool.

But note that as a business, your revenue in this case doesn't depend on lock-in, it depends on making things easier. You could in many cases distribute your stuff under the GPL (to your customers only, nobody says you have to distribute it to everyone) and still keep the same customers.

Making your product worse through anti-features like DRM and copy protection ultimately just gives any competition a clear opportunity to be obviously better than you by simply not doing work. If you have no competition or your product is vastly superior to the alternatives, then anti-features may help you extract more money out of your existing customers, in the short term. But they're not going to like you for it and clever consumers will avoid you entirely because they don't want to be locked in.

On the other hand, if you are an underdog with limited resources, I'd wager you'd usually be far better off spending the time/money on marketing and giving your customers what they want, than on implementing copy protection at all.