Agriya has taken the decision to start pro-actively licensing it’s software. When Agriya first began selling software 13 months ago, we encrypted all the files to prevent piracy. Our customers were understandably up in arms about this and the complaints kept flowing in.
In order to appease our client base, we removed the encryption and licensing, a decision we have now come to regret. Check out the numbers below and see why we have become so disturbed:
Agriya Software Piracy Stats
Number of sites illegally using our software: 379
Number of sites giving our software away for free: 86
Number of people trying to sell our software: 33
Number of DMCA notices served to date: 104
Number of files removed from file sharing sites: 819!
Piracy of Agriya’s software has reached a stage where we must take back control of our software and licensing, and if it means encrypting a few key files, then we are prepared to lose a tiny fraction of business to ensure our software is not pirated any more.
We currently employ two people full time to locate, track and remove people and websites who are sharing our software.
Agriya feels that it has no other decision than to start licensing our software pro-actively in order to combat software piracy. We tried it with open source access, and it was abused.
The first software to be licensed is Rayzz. In total there is one file encrypted that controls the script. The other files that are encrypted are for the licensing purposes. The file that has been encrypted should in no way hinder your prospects of customizing the code, adding new modules or customizing the template – the encryption is completely low impact.
There is also a call home feature built in to the software licensing. This basically calls back to Agriya’s server and finds out if it’s alright to run the script. Again, this is low impact and you won’t even notice the process going on as it’s designed to call home once every 15 days and you are allowed three attempts incase our server is down.
Over the coming weeks the rest of our software will be rolled out with the licensing and low impact encryption.
I sincerly hope you can appreciate why we have had to take these steps, and I’m really sorry if this causes any inconvenience. Of course, on a case by case basis we can review the encryption – for example if you are doing some heavy modification through Agriya.
