I think that in the last 7 years we have made piracy less attractive than buying a legit version.ntom wrote:I am aware of this, and while maybe some pirates MAY take that into consideration, most will not.
Baring that in mind, as I was saying, it's better for the developer - big or small - to try to continue to encourage customer loyalty, because using restrictive methods to undermine your actual legitimate customers doesn't do anything but harm your customers and make piracy look that much more attractive.
First we've made keygens impossible, then we've created delayed checks that no cracker team has ever found and recently we've also introduced a method that turns users of leaked serial numbers into paying customers. All without "calling home" or any other intrusive methods. Plain old serial number, and a lot of out-of-the-box thinking.
The result is, we've seen various videos like the one discussed here. Popular guys using lots of cracks. Whenever a u-he product was visible, it was a legit license. They buy our stuff because they know.
Our next step in anti piracy is thus educating other developers in full depth, i.e. open source our method (which, funnily, doesn't help cracking it)