This almost sounds like one of the companies I used to work for. I also would occassionally find our software, cracked, online. We would download the cracked version into a container and debug it. Reverse engineer the crack that reverse engineered our protection.
We never took it too serious. You don't have to lose sleep over it but you also shouldn't completely ignore it. Just refactoring the copy protection ever few release cycles. Most of the cracks were using Windows APIs to access entrypoints to flip variables. Simply renaming, moving them, or adding removing properties was enough to throw them off for a while.
We figured out some of our customers were using cracked editions without paying for more seats. The support calls were interesting because we told them the bug was fixed but they were super reluctant to update. We'd pass the message off to the accounts managers and let them wrangle with it. This was more prevalent in developing countries where pirating for business use wasn't considered a big deal.
I tried to bring up a low cost edition at our company meeting but it was shot down. The numbers wouldn't work. Business users get training provided; casual users would swamp our helpdesk in lieu of actual training.
The plan should always be to get those pirated users into actual users, unless the country they're in is embargoed, funny story. From reading the piracy forum thread I found many were using our software for job training in hopes of gaining foothold in the field. Similar to how Photoshop was everywhere in the early web design days.
We never took it too serious. You don't have to lose sleep over it but you also shouldn't completely ignore it. Just refactoring the copy protection ever few release cycles. Most of the cracks were using Windows APIs to access entrypoints to flip variables. Simply renaming, moving them, or adding removing properties was enough to throw them off for a while.
We figured out some of our customers were using cracked editions without paying for more seats. The support calls were interesting because we told them the bug was fixed but they were super reluctant to update. We'd pass the message off to the accounts managers and let them wrangle with it. This was more prevalent in developing countries where pirating for business use wasn't considered a big deal.
I tried to bring up a low cost edition at our company meeting but it was shot down. The numbers wouldn't work. Business users get training provided; casual users would swamp our helpdesk in lieu of actual training.
The plan should always be to get those pirated users into actual users, unless the country they're in is embargoed, funny story. From reading the piracy forum thread I found many were using our software for job training in hopes of gaining foothold in the field. Similar to how Photoshop was everywhere in the early web design days.