How we fight piracy

In the last months we had some serious problems with piracy, in fact our plugins were being distributed on some audio warez sites, so we started investigating.
The copies found on that websites weren’t cracked copies of our demos (the demo version of our plugins cannot be cracked since they miss the ability to save parameters, it’s not just disabled, it’s actually missing from the code!) in fact we found out that a client was uploading his payed copies and giving them away!

How were we supposed to identify this person?

After some tinkering we came out with the idea of signing the plugins with the email of the buyer that of course must be a valid customer email. A couple of php script later we had a new distribution system that know creates a zipped distribution on the fly after signing each plugin with the client email.

We released a new plugin, this was distributed to warez sites too, but this time I only had to download the illegal zip file and look at the signature to find out who was responsible for the distribution and terminate his license.

After this change we saw a drastic drop in the availability of our plugins on the warez sites, and if a new illegal version will come out we will be able to promptly identify it