It only comes up if they've already tried to pirate it. It's acting on the idea of price discrimination; the person trying to pirate the software has shown a decreased willingness to pay for the product, so econ theory says to lower the price for just that person in order to maximize revenue.

Yeah, I had the same thought. But what if you turn it into a game? Imagine this...

1. User tries to enter a bad SN or whatever; 2. You challenge him to let's say file X valid bug reports; 3. User gets 50% off or something like that.

It could work!

The world isn't so simple that we can slap 'good' and 'bad' labels on everything and expect things to be perfect. It's also not so trivial to condition people that we can simply create a punishment/reward system and expect it to fulfill it's role accurately.

Look at the failure that is the legal system and how badly it addresses the problem of crime. Even under the threat of the harshest penalties, crime still happens. Even after locking someone up in a cage, they are still likely to re-offend.

Think about it - people cooperate with people they like. Trying to take someone's money, physical freedom or whatever else makes you their enemy. People are very unlikely to cooperate with their enemies. The trick is to not trigger that "you're an enemy" response. The result is an open line of communication and a real chance that the behavior will change.

In other words, we're not Pavlov's Dogs and a little common sense goes a long way.

Given how many people are enamored by computing devices which only have one button, it's clear that the vast majority will pay full price instead of going to the trouble of downloading the pirated software, installing it, doing whatever needs to be done for the coupon code to come up and then paying. It's much simpler to buy the damn thing and be done with it. If someone is going through all that trouble, they probably can't afford the retail price.

Honestly? That's the only way to get a representative demo nowadays. I'm not at all ashamed to say I pirate the shit out of anything that costs more than about $20 to see if they'll fit my needs and run on my system before giving anyone a cent.

Let say that 5 out of 10 000 users triggered this. Then say that 2 out of those 5 would have bought a full copy but read/heard/noticed this method of getting a cheaper copy. Is that then a problem?

My guess is that the time this guy spent on this info box and coupon code far exceed the money from one license.

Can can be tweaked or removed if that becomes popular.