Voilating Copyright? Distributing Illegally?

I want to know what I can do if someone distribute's my php script illegally. I plan on using a php encoder to encrypt it, but of course all type of encryptions are not 100% secure. So if someone does happen to crack it and place it on a thousand bittorrent site's. What can I do?

There is really nothing you can do to prevent piracy. You can attempt to report links from file hosting services (eg: rapidshare, hotfile, et al.) but after awhile you'll just get really overwhelmed.

The best you can do is just entice people to support your product.

As Jordan says, there is nothing you can do to prevent piracy. There are far many people who find overcoming encryption programs an opportunity to prove their superiority (or something). This may be especially true if you've made clear that you have the equivalent of a chain-link fence or pit bulls guarding your work. In addition, there is still a widely held assumption that anything that appears on the Internet that is not behind a password is open for scavenging by anyone anywhere.

What if something happens? Well, first you have to wait until your rights have been violated before you can take action and the burden is on you to prove you've been stolen from. If the site isn't available for inspection, or if there are even minor changes to your work, your challenge will probably fail. If the thief is not in the US you have, in essence no recourse at all.

The cases you hear about? Large firms with aggressive and scary-sounding legal departments.

So, basically, you can do the work you want to do, or you can monitor and prosecute its theft. While it's probably worthwhile to take basic precautions but there's a decided point where protecting your work can overwhelm doing it, or getting it out there.

Jordan and Lowengard gave you great advice - even if you're right, there comes a point where pursuing pirates becomes counter productive.

Ok. How could I pursuit in the "Hacker" who caused the pirating to begin?

It's not financially worth it. You might not never know the exact source--most will go by nicknames and even then you don't know if that's the source or not.

A lot of times piracy exchanges hands so often that it just gets to be too convoluted. Person A releases it but person B modifies it and rereleases it. Person C downloads it, modifies what person A AND B did and releases it. So on and so forth.

You can attempt to contact IF you think you know (some will include their own readme with their URL/group name in it) but most of them will just ignore you and/or feel even more inspired to keep taking your work.

I just think you should stop worrying about piracy at this point because you're not going to save the world of it. It's disheartening yes.. but you have to come to terms (as sad as it is) that piracy WILL happen to you. It's just a matter of you having the funds to "battle" it.

I would spend some time here and there reporting files that are copyright to you but don't spend any more time than necessary. You have a more pressing issue to pay attention to--your own product!

So support your product, provide updates, provide support.. keep your paying customers satisfied. That's your main goal.

I figured I would just change all variable names with every purchase. A simple script could do that. Then encrypt and email to the person. I figured I could catch the source from who initially started pirating the script if decrypted. Since the original owner is purchasing through paypal, I'll have there personal information. I guess if I can't do nothing about it, then I am out of luck.

You dont need to change variable names before encoding, if you use something like ioncube it is solid. I am fairly up to date with web cracking and I am unaware of a functional way to reverse current versions of ioncube. Ioncube uses bytecode obfuscation which makes it practically impossible to turn back into PHP. Cracking the program to get past anti-pirating features is another story, there is no way to prevent that.

Village, it's completely possible to null scripts using the latest version of Ioncube (and Zend.)

The point of changing all the variables is to be able to see who started pirating the script =]. If everyone has the same variable's, tracing the hacker would be almost impossible. If they all got different version's, we'll someone's gonna get caught.