The key phrase here is "potential customers." People have argued that software piracy is not all bad because:

• some people who pirate the software wouldn't buy it anyway
• if it's a good product, the more people that know about it, the better

While there's undoubtedly some truth to these ideas, the reality is that, unless you take measures to significantly discourage software piracy, people will pirate your software and you will suffer a significant loss of revenue and, believe it or not, an increase in support costs!

Our belief, seemingly validated by experience, is that the overwhelming majority of people in Western-like cultures are basically honest. While, in this realm, we have no meaningful experience with people in other cultures, it is well documented that some cultures have integrated product piracy to a significant extent. Even so, it's still our belief that the majority of people are basically honest, regardless of the cultural influences.

However, when software piracy is made too easy, people are more likely to conclude that it's OK. This has long been the situation with photocopying printed material and quickly extended to copying software.

Today it's even worse because software is commonly distributed electronically. There's strong evidence that, when it takes a trivial amount of effort to find a simple license code for a software product, more people are willing to do so and thus pirate the software. As soon as you make it more difficult, the vast majority of those individuals become compliant. This is not unlike many other areas in life (e.g., deterrents "help" us obey traffic laws).

For a cost that is far outshadowed by the returns, our licensing services with the underlying LicenseControl capability will make it non-trivial for people to pirate your software. At the same time, we've avoided the problem areas that many other schemes have run into, many of which have alienated legitimate customers — LicenseControl doesn't do any of these:

• trying to be sneaky and "phone home behind the user's back"
• sending unspecified information that originates from the user's system
• using unsafe hacks that have the potential to impact system stability
• using high-priced and problem-prone security peripherals such as "dongles"

Aside from their technical shortcomings, we have a philosophical objection to most of these schemes. Instead, we use a combination of technologies and business process to provide a deterrent that's more than strong enough to encourage those vast majority of "basically honest" people to buy your software, rather than pirate it.

You should expect more sales, of course! We have seen an interestingly consistent statistic with our own software (we have used LicenseControl and our licensing services with our own products since April, 2003):

• the ratio of trial downloads to sales (paid licenses):
• is relatively constant over time
• is relatively constant for a given product
• varies surprisingly little across products

Our experience shows a predictable ratio of downloads-to-sales for different products (this includes downloads from all sites, not just our own). This predictability is very useful for business-planning purposes.

These numbers undoubtedly depend somewhat upon the product's most basic marketing materials (i.e., did they download something that does what they were led to believe by your marketing materials). Regardless of the absolute numbers, it's interesting that the ratio appears constant for a given product, over time.

These ratios are also far better than the numbers we've seen reported for shareware sales.

Nearly all software that has achieved any reasonable level of notoriety and isn't well protected is being pirated. Don't believe us? Here's some (perhaps startling, but relatively easy-to-find) information:

• a recent edition (Feb, 2010) of a serial-number database for Mac applications proudly proclaims "83 entries updated this month (8254 total)" — yes, this is a regular monthly "publication" — and this is just one, readily available source
• fire up any of the newer "not just for music" peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, enter some select keywords and you'll have hundreds of serial numbers within 15 minutes — persist searching for a number of days and you'll find almost anything that's available
• even a little Google-ing will find dozens of sites where you can search a database of products for serial numbers — and even my "seventy something" mother can use Google (sorry, Mom!)

'Nuff said. If you want to increase your sales revenue, sign up.