You sold your EA to 20 people. But there are 200 people running it. EA sharing is one of the most common and costly problems for Expert Advisor developers and most do not know how bad it is until they look.
This article breaks down exactly why it happens, why the common fixes do not work, and the only approach that actually stops it.
It is not always malicious. Some customers genuinely do not think of sharing a digital file as theft. They buy your EA, love it, and share it with a friend. That friend shares it with someone else. Within weeks your $99 EA is in a Telegram group with 500 members.
Other times it is deliberate. Someone buys a single license intending to resell access to others. You get one payment, they get ten. Either way the result for you is the same: lost revenue.
This prevents people from reading your source but does nothing to stop the .ex4 file being shared and run on any account.
This requires a recompile and redistribution every time you add a customer, and is easily bypassed by a decompiler or by demo accounts that match numbers in your list.
Good legal hygiene but zero technical protection. The people sharing your EA are not reading your terms.
Any protection that lives inside the .ex4 file can potentially be bypassed. Real protection requires a server-side check the EA must pass every time it runs, something that cannot be removed from the file.
Your EA makes an HTTPS call to a license server on every startup, sends the trader account number, and the server decides yes or no. If not authorized, the EA returns INIT_FAILED and never runs. Because the decision happens on your server there is nothing in the file to bypass.
Legitimate paying customers notice nothing. The check completes in under a second and the EA runs normally. Someone trying to run a shared copy gets a message in their Experts log and the EA never starts trading. There is nothing they can do without a valid license from you.
Add all your current customers to the dashboard before redistributing the new file. They will not notice a thing. Their EA keeps running. Only unauthorized users get cut off.
For the full technical setup guide, read our MT4 piracy protection tutorial or the MQL5 version here.
Setup takes 10 minutes. Your first 14 days are free.
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