Make the thieves work for it. Make them copy-paste.
Only one thief has to do the work of writing a tool that injects a handy button into the page to fetch your fic a chapter at a time, strip the page header/footer, and repack it to EPUB. All the others can just use a copy of the tool once it's been written.
There are valuable lessons to be learned from observing the video game industry from the 1980s to the present day.
The first lesson is that copy protection attracts crackers, simply by existing as a challenge for them to defeat. Many of the crackers may not actually want a copy of the protected work; they simply want the self-image boost and/or peer approbation that arises from defeating the copy protection in the first place.
The second lesson is that making copy protection stronger has a long and dishonorable history of inconveniencing honest users more than it inconvenienced crooks – which, in turn, encourages honest users to become crooks, because illicit copies are more convenient to use than legitimate ones.
(In the 00s and early 10s, many people who bought games full price would actually install cracked copies, because the cracks disabled the CD check.)
AO3 does not really have the resources to run a Red Queen's Race.
Comment on Releases 0.9.462 - 0.9.468: Change Log
grommile Wed 20 May 2026 06:13PM UTC
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NeaPoulain Wed 20 May 2026 08:33PM UTC
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