Not so funny when you see your applications pirated.
-mrainey
But if you watch out for your paying customer and keep him happy, and ignore the non-paying customer, you can be almost guaranteed that you are minimalizing the amount of sales that you are losing.
A really good example for me is the gaming DRM market. TAGES, SecurROM, and now UbiSoft's newest DRM scheme has lost them at least a few customers- I know friends who have always bought games that have either pirated or just not bought the games because of their heavy-handed approach. I hated even the lock to DVD stuff that was a replica of the lock to CD days, and it affected my buying. That's a direct relevance to their bottom line. I'd argue that DRM has made piracy *more* of a problem instead of less. By their inconvenience, they have brought awareness of piracy to the forefront- and awareness that people don't have to put up with the DRM if they just d/l a bittorrent client or limewire. If they had been satisfied with a minimal DRM scheme that's not an annoyance, but just made it so that the normal user would have to go out and get technical knowledge to have to bypass it, I would almost guarantee that they would have *less* problems now- not more. But the genie's out of the bottle, and heavy-handed tactics aren't going to put it back in.
There have been some killer games out that have had equally killer DRM schemes and though I've wanted them, the DRM has kept me away. That *never* happened in the old days- which tells you that at least in my case (though I'm sure there are other examples of it) their DRM-heavy approach is leading them in the wrong direction fiscally.
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