The Fish Bowl blog has a entry about David Watanabe's production activation issue with the Newsfire RSS reader. After reinstalling MacOS X on his MacBook, product activation said his email address was no longer valid and Watanabe suggested it was used for piracy.

Sounds familiar. In Febuary I reinstalled MacOS and tried to reactivate Acquisition (also made by Dave Watanabe), and I got the same kind of message. I could not activate the product with my email. I emailed Dave and he asked for my paypal trasaction ID. He then came back with this response.

Your license has been pretty clearly used by software pirates. David.

It's Not clear to me! I purchased Acquisition in 2003, only ever used it on two computers and I never shared my email with anyone. I replied and said this isn't possible and must be a mistake, but I didn't get any more responses from Dave. A little research (various comments at MacUpdate) indicates that I'm not the only one that has had the activation problem with Acquisition.

Clearly, legitimate users are getting lost in the noise of piracy. Dave's product activation scheme is flawed. People interested in pirating his software only need a email address to activate a item. It doesn't take nearly as much effort to target users who have said they use his software, or just guess vs. issuing a serial number. Instead Dave chooses to insult his customers by calling them pirates.

Update 18 April 2007: Look at Dave Watanabe has a blog entry yesterday and attempts to justify his activation scheme.

simple cooperation and open dialog are usually enough to fix those situations... Are anti-piracy mechanisms bad for the user? Of course not. The honest user should never have an issue and the dishonest users are kept from ruining a project.

Bullhockey on both of those points. I am a honest user and Dave wasn't willing to talk to me.