PageFour has been cracked.

For those of you too honest to know what cracking is, let me enlighten you. It’s when some shady hacker type character working out of a dingy bedroom in Bucharest downloads your software, hacks it in such a way that any license restrictions are overridden, and releases the ‘crack’ to the entire world.

Version 1.28 went live last Saturday evening, and by Wednesday the deed was done - downloads went through the roof; referrals from very shady sites in Hong Kong and Russia were way up; and I came within a hairs breadth of a coronary.

Team AGGRESSiON were the party responsible. Note the small ‘i’ in AGGRESSiON - I’m sure it has great meaning amongst the hacking and cracking fraternity.

I’ll be honest, I had a bit of an emotional reaction when I found out. The cursing and swearing was heard from Hampton Court Palace all the way to Putney Bridge. I spent a frantic hour adding URLs to my htaccess file and worrying over the bandwidth being consumed before retiring to a very unpeaceful rest.

But the dawn of a new day brought a whole new perspective.

Does it do me any harm?

Not that I can see. So there are hundreds of new PageFour users in China and the developing world - all churning out novels at a ferocious rate thanks to my innovative designs. Who knows, I may be single handedly responsible for a literary renaissance in the far east.

Would any of these people who downloaded the cracked software have actually bought the product? A simple no.

Will it increase the visibility of the product? Well, it won’t do it any harm.

So where’s the downside?

Honestly, these isn’t one that I can see. Downloads have continued over the past few days, though not at quite the furious rate of days 1 and 2, and my bandwidth is pretty high, so no problem there.

I choose to take it as a complement. After all, they only crack the good stuff, right?