Apparently, I'm a pirate. So I may as well talk like one.
We got an e-mail today from vBulletin letting us know that we had violated the DMCA.
They've hired some company to track down unlicensed versions of their software.
Well, we have a valid vBulletin license. We've had one for more than five years. We even went to the vBulletin web site to verify that our license is valid. And THEIR web site said our license was valid.
They also sent a letter to our ISP (Internap) telling them to shut us down.
Needless to say, this wasn't a fun way to start the day. So now our number one priority is to abandon everything we are working on and make sure that Internap doesn't shut us down.
After a few hours of harassing vBulletin, we finally got them to send a letter saying they had made a mistake. Problem solved for now.
Everyone makes mistakes. I understand that. I program for a living so I write mistakes into my code almost every day. But this is just another example of a company pissing off their customers in an expensive attempt to shut down pirates.
We run a board with over 7,000 members and 700 new posts every day. We have to deal with spammers and hackers and trolls. It would be silly for us to steal vBulletin and not have access to the latest patches. But somehow our name snuck through their system and almost got our site shut down. We just spent much of the last month dealing with a problem in vBulletin that was bringing down our entire site. And now we get accused of stealing their software?
I can't blame vBulletin for worrying about piracy. It just seems that every time I hear about some anti-piracy scheme, even something as simple as electronic licenses, it ends up pissing off it's customers more than it helps the company.
So although this sounds like a rant against vBulletin, it isn't. It's a rant against all the anti-piracy companies that are out there convincing software developers to spend their time and money fighting piracy instead of putting it into the product or customer service.
