Software piracy: What can you do about it?

You spent days, nights, weekends and holidays to develop your software and finally released them. Then you found that the software is cracked within hours of its release. What can you do? You can contact some organizations who claim to fight piracy. You are lucky if they even respond to your email or phone call.
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Our Story (Continued)


Obtaining settlements or award

Once you have tracking data, you can confront the infringing companies and ask them pay for the illegal registration of your software. The amount you ask for is many times more than the cost of the software product to cover the cost of your time, legal expenses and related services. However, it is not easy to obtain a settlement, for the following reasons:
1. Infringing companies and individuals generally ignore software developers' complaints. They know that you do not have the resources to pursue this matter in civil court.
2. They challenge your data and claim that your data is not valid. Or they claim that software was simply downloaded for trial but never registered or used illegally.

You can consult and obtain the services of a copyright attorney. However,
1. Most copyright attorneys will charge you an hourly rate ($300-450 or more) to pursue infringement of your software.
2. Very few copyright attorneys have any experience with shareware copyright cases. You will be paying $300-450/hour for them to learn how to pursue your cases.
3. You can accumulate more than $15,000 in legal fees before you even get your first settlement check. This could turn out to be a losing proposition for the developer if there is not enough settlement.

Conclusions

Piracy is a worldwide problem that costs software developers billions of dollars every year. Large software companies have tremendous resources to prosecute software pirates worldwide. Smaller software developers are the most vulnerable to this crime due to the nature of the business:
1. Products are published online,
2. Registration key can be unlocked by crackers, and
3. Most of the software developers have limited resources to pursue their copyright’s infringers.

We hope that more education will bring piracy rates down. We also hope that more countries are serious about enforcing their copyright law. In the mean time, we will have to fight the crime whatever way we can. We have been working with law firms in North America, Europe and Asia to pursue pirates. We still have a long journey ahead to make the Internet fairer for software developers worldwide. The best way to reduce software piracy, is for developers to stand up and fight piracy of their products.