Users of pirated versions of the app can soon expect to be told to “walk the plank… Fer piratin'” and will also see random pirate-themed events added to their calendar. Invitations to “pirate parties” may be received too.
The pro version of the app costs $5.99 from Google Play but the developer believes that 85 percent of pro users have actually pirated his creation. He doesn’t actually have a major issue with this, explaining that the majority of the users who pirate the app wouldn’t pay for it anyway, but said that he expected the figure to be around 50 percent.
He added the pirate-themed annoyances after a suggestion from Reddit user emrikol who wrote “Instead of adding piracy prevention, you should just randomly add pirate themed events to their schedule. And rename Thursday to Tharrsday.”
The developer was inspired by this and used it to get the idea for the pirate-themed spoof events added to the calendars of users who have the pro version of the app through illegitimate means. He told TorrentFreak “These events won’t start occurring instantly, but when they do they’ll happen a lot so the cracker (at first) won’t see the event coming, but once they start, they might get annoying quite quickly… The plan is that people will get so bored of being invited to ‘pirate parties’ and being told to walk the plank that they’ll give up and just buy the thing.”
It is certainly an interesting and unique way to combat piracy. He has already begun remotely adding the events to the calendars of users he believes have not paid for the software. It remains to be seen if the sporadic “pirate party” invitations and “walk the plank” suggestions will actually make the pirates buy the app.
