On the effect of piracy

To all the doubters out there who think that piracy doesn’t hurt the bottom line of small software companies, I say this. Our products have recently been subject to an attempt (albeit a flawed one) to crack the protection. It didn’t work, but that hasn’t stopped the distribution of the broken cracked copies, which are likely to damage peoples’ data.

Nor does the fact that these cracked versions could do serious damage dissuade people from downloading them, apparently. We can see from our daily sales figures a drop of nearly 30% since the illegal copies first appeared. Yes, that’s right, 30%.

The worst thing though, worse even than losing 30% of our business to these jerkoffs, is that because the crack was done by an incompetent, the programs could terminate at any time while they’re working on the users’ disks, leaving them with potentially serious filesystem damage. Filesystem damage for which we will be blamed, though it’s not our fault in the slightest.

Posted by alastair on July 22, 2008 at 6:14 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)