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Comment by pbasista | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest that, instead of trying to complain about the people copying your products, which I think is practically impossible to avoid, and even from your own experience preventing it has led nowhere so far, you should focus on making sure that your version of the product is the best one. So that the people will naturally use it instead of those repackaged versions.

> take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it

I would assume that this might be one of the reasons why people are modifying and repackaging your product. I would suggest to remove that incentive. So that the people will have no reason to repackage your product because it has annoying features. And so that they could use it directly and be happy about it.

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But he could spend months adding a feature just for someone to spend 10 minutes running it through an LLM and shoving it up for free on GitHub.

Of course.

I think that the differentiating factor must be something else than the software product feature. Because that can easily be copied or recreated.

It can be e.g. the customer support where customers will be listened to and will have their suggestions and requests implemented as features.

That's why you don't put your logic in the client, especially not JavaScript.

Arguably Photopea made a mistake, and now they are paying for it.

They can fight, but it's a losing battle.

That's a weird take. It's like if your boss considers outsourcing your job to a country with cheaper labor you suggest stop asking for a salary.

Which to be fair, would maybe actually work, and there are political positions that want to achieve such an economic system. Not that I would necessarily agree with them.

I do not understand how what you have suggested could be considered as an appropriate analogy.

No one implied that the author should offer their product for free. I merely suggested that they need to focus on other aspect of their product rather than the mechanical software parts because they can no longer be the differentiating factor. Precisely because they could easily be recreated or copied.

I replied to a comment suggesting removing the ads.

If you can't demonstrate there is value in keeping you vs outsourcing the job, well, that's naturally going to happen.

I say that as someone who thinks about this almost every day.

>you should focus on making sure that your version of the product is the best one. So that the people will naturally use it instead of those repackaged versions.

Do you have any concrete ideas for how to do this or are you just saying this to defend piracy?

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