organplayer wrote:
Let me make another remark: We are since a lot of time develloper of specialised software in a very small medical market. Years ago we had the problem with piracy and hacking the locked software too. But when we made the price of the software only the half and offered it more modular, we sold 4 (!) times more and made a lot of money (forget the piracy!).).
As I pointed out in a recent, and apparently now deleted, thread here, the music industry gave up on copy protection, in part because it was so burdensome to the consumer that it had the counter-result of encouraging people to seek out the pirate's unprotected versions. And, in part, because Apple iTunes demonstrated that most consumers would gladly pay for their music if it was free of copy protection, unbundled from the requirement of purchasing an album, and at a fair price-point.
Increased digital "security", i.e. copy-protection, is never beneficial to the consumer and, I believe, can be of questionable benefit to the software developer and content producer. The need to protect one's work from piracy is understandable, but places developers and producers between a rock and a hard spot.
On the one hand, rampant piracy will destroy their business, while on the other, burdensome protection schemes that inconvenience their consumers and put their purchase investments at financial risk will have the same result. It's important to realize that no matter how robust the copy-protection is, piracy will never be totally eliminated and that the more burdensome and expensive the product becomes to use, the more piracy will occur. This suggests that the best strategy is a combination of security measures and an approach to marketing and pricing that makes pirated versions less desirable.