Licensing and Piracy

So here's me, a designer with a few self made tools to make my life easier. Now that I'm 2 days away from my first software release for one of these tools (in a swanky new outfit) I must say that I'm thinking about canceling the whole thing.

It looks like the pirates have scored another victory. The time it would take to secure my $10 application would make it a $49 application just to learn basic cryptography and write another application around it that locks it down until your name, serial number and e-mail address are entered and a new serial number is calculated that would append to the existing one to unlock it for use. I don't think that it is worth the effort and think about releasing it at all.

The other possible alternative is to load stuff that you don't see from my web server to track your name and location which isn't so bad and I'm just thinking to go for that and publish the names and personal contact information of the software pirates on static HTML documents that can easily be cached by Google and the Internet Archive of the Library of Congress, marking one as a thief till the end of all things.

Yes I think that's the way to do it and if you bought the software legally there's nothing to fear, but if you need to steal the software and are not willing to pay the remedy (all possible sales minus the actual sales from product launch to tracking of the pirate) then you will find yourself on the web, marked as a thief and reported to your local newspaper and police.