Advice on Mitigating Piracy

I received an email asking my advice about how to deal with software piracy when selling downloadable PHP applications. Here is my (slightly edited) response:


It boils down to a choice between which is more important:

  • making things easier for paying customers
  • making it harder for people to use without paying

Once you decide which of these is most important to you, the decisions you face fall easily into one of those two buckets.