Someone is distributing my item. What can I do?

Report it and we act, including pursuing takedowns where we can get them. It is also worth being straight with you about what licence checking can and cannot do.

Report it

Send the link through report an item or a ticket, with the URL and your item. We handle the notices. Do not spend your own weekend arguing with the site, it rarely goes anywhere and it costs you time you could spend on the next release.

What licence checking actually achieves

No licence check that runs on somebody else's server can be made uncrackable. Your code is on their machine, and code on a machine somebody controls can be read and changed. Anyone selling you a scheme that cannot be broken is selling you something.

What it does do is real, and worth having:

• It keeps honest buyers honest, which is the large majority of them.
• It makes casual copying more effort than paying.
• It stops one licence quietly becoming fifty across an agency.
• It gives you a record of where your item is actually installed.

What genuinely cannot be copied

Whatever your item does that depends on your server. A service you host, data you maintain, a model you run, updates only you can publish. If part of the value lives at your end, a copied zip is worth much less than the real thing, and no amount of patching changes that.

Keep some perspective

Almost every item that sells well ends up on those sites. It correlates with success rather than with weak protection. The people downloading it were mostly never going to pay, and the ones who would pay generally want updates, support and something that will not quietly wreck their site, none of which a copy comes with.