I gave someone a trial copy of my program and he then cracked it and released it on his site. I charge for my program and I do have his IP address and chat logs. What should i do?
Depending on how hard you want to go after him, get a lawyer specialized on copyright issues. My opinion: Live with it. Try to make the protection harder, release updated versions every once in a while without changing version numbers, use online verification, ... There are many ways, google and you will find a lot of good sites explaining how to "better" protect software. Of course you will never stop people from cracking your program if it's worth the effort.
What crap for a response. Did he only crack the trial version or has he unlocked your trial version to full version? One thing you should do is contact his ISP immediately with a C&D for piracy, trademark, and copyright infringement. If you believe the person is in a country with good intellectual property laws (not india obviously) then maybe you can hire a lawyer but it's most likely this person operates from one of the many lawless nations that we should simply firewall from the entire internet.
You will need to look at the reality of time/ effort/ cost of pursuing them against the likelihood of success and the cost their actions will have to your "business". If your in the USA they are in Nigeria and their hosts are in Iran you realistically would have to accept that the chances of any enforcement is exceptionally slim even if they dont have a legal leg to stand on.
I am sorry to hear that someone has cracked your programme but unless you can spend serious money on a lawyer, there is not really much you can do apart from locking down the programme. So, there are two choices; 1) Spend money on a specialist lawyer (expensive!) 2) Spend time securing your programme with internet activation which say checks the validity of the license every time they start up the programme. That would at least "reduce" the amount of fraud on your product, it probably wont stop it. Most of the big programmes get cracked within week one of release, Windows, Adobe, Iphones the list could be really long.
In my opinion, Screw the guy and on the next release of your program, beef up the security so he can't recrack it.
I would hire someone like to me to increase the protection on your current software. Then I would contact his ISP, and continually do so as he changes around. Depending on how popular your software is, you could also hire a lawyer. Good luck
My suggestion is to cut your losses for now, re-program your coding for your application, and learn from your past mistake. Crackers are going to manipulate your program regardless, based on how useful it is for them. They are usually pretty good at reverse engineering and there is not much you can do in this regard. All I would say to you is to make the program as best as you can and provide as many security precautions as you can for it.
I've decided not to hire a lawyer. I contacted his ISP and his webhost and talked to them. I'm going to have only partially coded trial versions so they would be impossible to crack because it wouldn't have the coding in it