Independent Developers Fight Piracy & Lose

An anonymous reader writes "The author of the Echelon decided to take his fight against software piracy to the next level and then threw in the towel. After someone began posting new serial numbers on a well known hacking site, the author took matters into his own hands. With version 1.0, entering a hacked serial number causes the software deleted the user's Home directory. Yes, you read it right, the software completely erases it (aka rm -rf ~). A variety of people have voiced some some strong opinions on this. While some argue that piracy is good for established companies, a few large companies are battling piracy and having limited success. Small, independent developers, however, are recognising this is a serious problem and are generally stumped by what to do about it."

Comments

Deleteing the $HOME is unacceptable

[grumbel]

Deleteing the $HOME is of course unacceptable and should be punishable by law without much problems. Just because I stole your bike, doesn't mean that you are allowed to burn down my house, both things are a crime and the first doesn't justify the second.

The issue would be quite a bit trickier if instead of doing something obviously illegal the software would instead do something less obvious like trying to find the address, name or other personal information about the computer user who used the cracked serial and mail it to the author of the software so that he in turn could inform the police.

Re:Too Far?

[Lord_Dweomer]

That would be one option, if it wasn't extortion.