Corel Manages To Accuse A Totally Legit Customer Of Piracy

from the oops dept

While piracy and ways to combat it may be weighing heavily on the minds of many a software producer, it's quite unfortunate that more of them don't consider conversely how their anti-piracy efforts will impact their legit customers. You can see this sort of thing all over the place in the software world, most prominently when it comes to DRM, which tends to stop almost no piracy but manages to annoy legit customers.

But DRM isn't the only method out there for combating piracy. Corel came up with a patented approach that detects pirated versions of its software and attempts to get the pirate to pay up.

Earlier this year we reported on Corel’s efforts in this space after the company obtained a patent for a system which is able to offer an amnesty to illegal users via a popup. “The amnesty offer may, for example, agree not to bring criminal charges in exchange for the user purchasing a legitimate copy of the product,” Corel’s patent reads. “In this manner, the user of the pirated version is given the opportunity to purchase a legitimate copy which, if acted on, increases revenue for the manufacturer.”

It's not the worst strategy in the world, even if it harkens back somewhat to those copyright troll threat letters that have been on the rise for the past few years. Still, if the system can accurately detect a pirated copy of the software, and if the messaging requesting payment isn't too heavy-handed, it's not a bad way to try to reach out to pirates for payment.

But what if it isn't so accurate? And what if legit customers are suddenly told they're pirates? And what if Corel then treats that person with something less than a full mea culpa? This all already happened, of course.

Earlier this week, TorrentFreak was contacted by an angry Corel customer who was witnessing first hand what can happen when a piracy detection system blows a fuse. “I am a valid and licensed user and Corel support has records of my license key and right to use this software on my work PC,” he told us.

The user got a popup accuses him of using "illegal" software before requesting payment, at a discounted rate no less. His Corel software, used at his place of work, was also disabled. Suddenly, this user couldn't get access to his or her work product, all because Corel's anti-piracy system crapped the bed and called a customer a pirate. After a lengthy back and forth -- the user was unable to operate for at least a full day -- Corel managed to correct the issue, albeit in a manner totally opaque to the end user. The customer has no idea if his software is now correctly licensed, if he got a new license, or if Corel just put him on some whitelist so as not issue more threats.

Oh, and Corel also hasn't bothered to apologize.

“I’m not sure how [the steps Corel took] corrected my license issue or if it just took me off the ‘hit list’ of victims of what I still feel was some kind of scam. Still no apology from Corel for the problems caused or the delays it forced on me,” he added.

Reached for comment, a Corel rep made a great deal of noise about unlicensed resellers causing all of these problems. TorrentFreak went back to the affected user to ask where he had bought his copy of the software. The answer? Corel's website. This was verified by a review of the purchase receipt. After all of this, Corel finally relented and, I suppose as something of an apology, offered the customer a 5% discount on future purchases.

“I want to ask them if that 5% is good for Photoshop,” the customer commented dryly.

And that really should tell you everything you need to know about the dangers of a crappy anti-piracy system annoying your customers.

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Filed Under: copyright, drm, piracy

Companies: corel