HACKER Q&A
📣 sawirricardo

How do you handle people "steal" your product to resell it?


Hi, want to ask, especially to people who build businesses based on selling one off time type product.

How do you handle these customers who at first purchase your app, then.... resell it? I think the legal action alone is quite cumbersome, but anything we can do at least how to defend againts that?

Let's take an example with 37Signal's ONCE product. They allow their customers to get access to the code, yet personally I don't see how they will do if one of the customers decide to just resell the code they just purchase...

Are there any solution to this? Will be appreciated if we can discuss things other than to just "be silenced"/keep doing your things/your competion will not last that long/etc...

  👤 datascienced Accepted Answer ✓
Don’t worry about it. Just make sure your product links back to YOUR site for lots of things so that the copycats are giving you free marketing. When you add product 2 that will help!

Also you could mention that people buying from the genuine site get product updates etc. Both on your site and in the product.

👤 bruce511
Access to code doesnt negate copyright law.
👤 konha
Depending on how openly and where this happens you might be able to get the platform they are selling your software on or their payment processor to take them down.

That's for legitimate platforms and processors of course. If it's on some darknet bulletin board - tough luck. Not worth the time.

👤 throwaway38375
It's much easier to take down the services supporting the thief, rather than taking down the thief.

The thief won't care if you tell them to stop. But their domain registrar, web host, video host, social media accounts, and payment processor will care about copyright infringement.

👤 jfil
Clearly adding the purchaser's data to each product (think, watermarking a PDF with the name and email of the purchaser) might deter resellers. And would make it easier to trace who's reselling.
👤 duped
The easiest solution is to know your customer and not sell it to someone that will probably steal it.
👤 muhammadibne
just ship fast, outsource to virtual assistants or use ai tools/copilot to build anything and launch fast even if its fault. launch 10 times in a 10 months than once every 10 months ig.