Ask Slashdot: What Is a Reasonable Way To Deter Piracy?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie developer about to release a small ($5 — $10 range) utility for graphic designers. I'd like to employ at least a basic deterrent to pirates, but with the recent SimCity disaster, I'm wondering: what is a reasonable way to deter piracy without ruining things for legitimate users? A simple serial number? Online activation? Encrypted binaries? Please share your thoughts."

You should be so lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

If your software actually gets pirated that means people like it enough to want it and need it to bother to pirate it. You should be so lucky to write a piece of software that is that popular. Quit flattering yourself.

Re:life-long updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Paranoid much???

So...you'll just give up your credit card info to anyone that says they're offering a good product?

Boy, do I have a deal for you!

Re:life-long updates

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here!

Re:life-long updates

[Nefarious Wheel]

Along these lines, make the program available in an App Store [apple.com]. This makes it easier for paying customers. It's tiring when I want to buy a program to have to do some background research on payment processors to see if a developer chose one that is trustworthy. But Apple already has my credit info, buying is easy and safe.

But do graphics developers, of the sort who would be interested in a productivity tool, use the iPad as a development platform?

Re:Read This

[wonkey_monkey]

Read this. Memorize it.

I did, but now I've forgotten C++. Thanks a bunch!

Re:life-long updates

[Immerman]

Not giving your credit card info to some random person or "company" is paranoid now? Well shit, tell you what, I've got a lovely iPad I'll sell you for a nickle, just give me your credit card info...

Re:life-long updates

[Stormy Dragon]

On a similar note, I once saw a utility that, if unregistered, would let you use everything in it, the only catch being that all of the fonts in the tool switched to Comic Sans.

Just make something nobody wants

[damn_registrars]

After all, do you see anyone pirating slashdot? It is a fool-proof strategy that has worked for taco and the rest of the employees of this site for a long time now!

Re:life-long updates

[ericloewe]

Could be worse. Could be Wingdings.

Re:life-long updates

[hh10k]

Most amusing (and effective) DRM I ever saw was actually a fairly loose and easily broken copy protection scheme

I did this with my game. The code that checked the cd-key was easily bypassed, but that code also fixed a critical bug that happened on level 10. It was funny that we had people coming to our support forum asking for help, and we could easily call them out as pirates!

We actually manage to convince one of them to buy the game properly.