Thought about it a bit, and I'm probably not going to do anything about it, not yet at least. I want to concentrate on delivering value, not this b*llsh*t especially as my time is very limited and this is a one-man project. I'm actually in the midst of working with the next patch release, which ironically contains fixes for handling Russian file names on the Windows platform... the interest from eastern countries is very high, but the sales are few (not zero though!)... I wonder why...?
Typical pirates generally don't buy anything ever, period. Even if it was €1, and they don't care if it's a struggling niche product from one hard-working individual or a well-established global hit from a huge company. If they can't get it for free they just don't get it, so technically you don't lose money on them, they're just a bunch of annoying ***holes, especially when they ask for support or demand some feature, or just generally say your software sucks and isn't worth the money (but still use it, just to rub it in). Serious higher end users, those that need the Pro and/or Repro editions is not the problem. Working photographers generally knows all about getting their own work pirated. I'm confident they will buy, and most customers so far are pro photographers or very serious amateurs. Many medium format users.
Where I expect to lose money is among more casual users that really only need the Basic version, but rather than paying €30 for that gets an illegal copy of the Repro for free. How many will those be? 5%, 10%, 30%, 50%? It's too early to estimate. If it's say 5-10% of actual losses it's very hard from a business standpoint to motivate counter-measures. It would be one thing if I would actually enjoy making them, but I certainly don't.
On the other hand it's for the Basic version there could be actual volume which could make this project profitable, that would be nice and it would be good for everyone. If it starts making real money I can work more on it, and I really want to. The Pro/Repro users is the core group, what makes this worthwhile and important for the quality of the project, but I need an unrealistic amount of them to actually cover development cost. There's a reason BasICColor is €500+VAT and ColorPony is $1000, and there's a bunch of half-dead or fully dead historical profilers. If you rely on pro users alone, the volumes will be very low and you thus need steep pricing.
So it's not a clear-cut case...
