Even as an indie software developer, this makes me sad.
Rapidshare was the most responsive to copyright complaints out of all the filesharing sites, they took down links within 2 hours of being reported. But instead of nuking cracks to my software on Rapidshare immediately, it meant I let the Rapidshare links stay alive longer, because I knew I could turn them off whenever I wanted. I'd rather people uploaded cracks to RapidShare where I could see how popular / unpopular a link was & had control over when to remove it, than somewhere like MegaUpload that would deliberately take a long time to remove links.
I never saw evidence of piracy helping sales (always hurt sales) and I never used it for promotion, but I was more worried about cracks that came bundled with a virus, or that came bundled with a collection of illegal images. That stuff had to be nuked straight away for the protection of customers (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software).
> (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software).
I never saw that. Even when I was young, that was something obvious, and I never heard someone else mention that he beliefs cracks come from the company making the original software. Where is that coming from? Is that your impression because you get support requests for cracks?
Yup, I get some support requests where I have to explain to the customer that they never bought the software. They'll tell me the Photoshop Tutorial they downloaded my software from, inevitably with a link to a Rapidshare download. They're not looking at URLs and might not even understand they're downloading from a different website to the tutorial. Some have told me they got my software from "a Photoshop Tutorial that you advertised your software on". Ugh.
It's worth noting that while I have customers of all ages, many are older / elderly (many in their late 60s and a few in their 80s & 90s). They're not the most tech savvy, they don't understand the cracking scene & some need a lot of time-consuming handholding. Often wonderful & friendly folks, but they don't grok computers the same way the usual Hacker News reader will.
Wow dude, props for referring to people who crack your software as 'customers' and going through the trouble of protecting them. Most companies don't even realize that things like this can actually hurt their image.
Can you provide some info about the way piracy hurt sales - like - when a crack appears for new version, suddenly sales plummet until new version is out?
Rapidshare was the most responsive to copyright complaints out of all the filesharing sites, they took down links within 2 hours of being reported. But instead of nuking cracks to my software on Rapidshare immediately, it meant I let the Rapidshare links stay alive longer, because I knew I could turn them off whenever I wanted. I'd rather people uploaded cracks to RapidShare where I could see how popular / unpopular a link was & had control over when to remove it, than somewhere like MegaUpload that would deliberately take a long time to remove links.
I never saw evidence of piracy helping sales (always hurt sales) and I never used it for promotion, but I was more worried about cracks that came bundled with a virus, or that came bundled with a collection of illegal images. That stuff had to be nuked straight away for the protection of customers (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software).