One day you will find your item on a site giving it away. Every seller has this moment. What matters is what you do in the week afterwards, because most of the obvious responses cost more than they recover.
Who actually downloads those
Overwhelmingly, people who were never going to pay. They do not become customers if the free copy vanishes; they move to the next free copy. Treating a thousand downloads as a thousand lost sales leads to decisions that punish your real buyers.
What is worth doing
- Send a takedown notice. It often works, it costs an hour, and it keeps your item off the first page of results
- Make sure the copy going round is old. Ship updates and the pirated version ages badly by itself
- Keep the things piracy cannot copy: support, updates, and a licence that makes commercial use lawful
What is not worth doing
Do not add aggressive protection that punishes buyers. Every seller who has bolted on a hard kill switch has taken down a paying customer's site with it, and that costs more in one afternoon than the piracy did all year.
The licence check is not a lock
It is a record of who owns what, and a reason for a business to buy legitimately rather than risk running unlicensed software. Anyone determined enough will remove it. That is accepted in the design, which is why the offline grace period exists rather than a hair trigger.
The consolation
Pirated items are usually the ones worth pirating. It is a miserable compliment, but it is a signal that you built something people want.
