Recover License Revenue

Unlicensed use falls into two categories: overuse by licensed customers and overt piracy by “customers” you don’t have a relationship with (yet). While your recovery strategies may differ based on the type of unlicensed use, your first challenge is to identify the organizations that are actually using your software to operate their businesses and that have the ability to pay the license cost.

Can software piracy ever be stopped? It’s unlikely, but software vendors can implement compliance initiatives that can recover revenue directly from businesses using it. Many vendors start with less accurate approaches to generate leads like “whistleblower” campaigns, disgruntled employees, and customer support data.

Piracy Business Intelligence

While some software vendors have developed their own technologies to capture piracy data with basic functionality, they had to shift resources from their core development competencies to do so. V.i. Labs offers CodeArmor Intelligence – a complete and tested system to track and identify organizations using unlicensed software. Our web-based Piracy Dashboard offers easy access to infringement data and information on non-compliant organizations to help you qualify and prioritize your revenue recovery targets.

What Do You Want to Know?

The piracy data collected by CodeArmor Intelligence can answer the questions that are most important to your job and enable you to make data driven decisions.

• Who is using our software and can they pay for licenses?
• How many computers in a business have unlicensed software on them?
• How often is our unlicensed software used at that business?
• Which geographic regions have the most rampant use of unlicensed software?
• Which of our products are most likely to be used unlicensed?
• Which versions of our software are most likely to be used unlicensed?

In addition to our CodeArmor Intelligence products, V.i. Labs also offers piracy monitoring services to assess piracy risk and test fielded deployments.

What is Your Response to Piracy?

ISV Responses to Piracy (Click Image to Enlarge)

There are typically three phases of responses to piracy - where do you fit?

Discovery Phase ("We're not sure there is a problem"):

• Pirated software is not used by legitimate businesses
• We do not think our licensing/activation system has been cracked
• Would our customers use unlicensed software?
• If we have complex software or a niche market, will piracy be low?

Reaction Phase ("We have piracy, shouldn't we stop it?"):

• Should we prevent piracy with stronger license enforcement or protection?
• Can we take down piracy sites or disable links?

Enlightenment Phase ("We can't stop it, but want actionable intelligence to recover revenue"):

• We can’t prevent it, so how can we determine who is using our pirated software so we can recover the revenue?
• How can we generate actionable intelligence from unlicensed use?
• How can we accelerate our existing compliance initiatives?