serial numbers on standalones

[kee nethery]

On Mar 16, 2013, at 9:52 AM, "Dr. Hawkins" <dochawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Using someone else's key will also put their name and address on the
> output, which is only useful for filing with the court . . .

Unless you are postal mailing the software to your customers AND looking at every order before you create a unique standalone, my name is "Free Copy" and my address is "Any Street, USA". And I don't know how my copy got up on that torrent site.



The people who make a lot of money selling software are those that focus on how to get more people to use their software, not those who focus on how to get less people to use their software. 

The "get more people" group occasionally will "crack" their software and upload that crack to a crack site so that people can steal their software. Having a crack shows that someone cared enough about the software to spend time to crack it because of the street cred that would give them. No one cracks lame software thus … this software must not be lame. In addition, no one wants to be the second person to crack some software so other cracks don't appear.

Secondly, most people that pirate software don't really use it. And if they do, you've just had someone experience your software and figure out what it is good for. People like me who pay for software, ask for recommendations, and I'm fairly certain that many of the recommendations come from people who have pirated software. Pirates can be your advertising channel.

Finally, the crack if the pirate is still using the cracked software after 6 months, they can be converted into a buyer. It has some weird bug that pops up. The solution to that specific bug is to buy the upgrade. If someone running a cracked version gets that error message, they are using it for real and they will frequently pay for the upgrade.

Kee Nethery