Yeah, taking something you didn't make and reselling it is more in line with theft than piracy since you're now directly taking money that should have gone to the creator of that thing. Art theft is annoyingly common for instance, and it looks roughly like that.
But those kinds of people, they're not gonna stop, none of these kinds of measures are going to stop them, reselling something like this is a much more easily persecutable crime than standard piracy, but that doesn't stop those people, nothing will stop those people; in southeast asia it's common for products to be sold as if they belong to one brand or another, but they aren't really of that brand, the brand is just put on there to make it easier to sell, and people will knowingly buy those fakes too because the real brand is expensive.
That is a dangerous game to play, but a lot of people do that, it takes more effort than reselling pirated content, it's more dangerous legally speaking, and yet that doesn't stop people from doing it.
Which should put into perspective how this little song and dance can't and won't really achieve anything for them except waste the creator's time on nonsense. Because that's all it is, wasting time on something that's not preventable in the first place. These measures don't even really make it harder to pirate either, all it does, it make things more difficult for their actual customers, and makes the creators themselves have less time to work on creating more goodies becaues they're spending it all on policing their existing stuff.
You know how authors handle this? They just release content faster than it can reasonably be expected to be pirated.
Piracy takes time, it generally doesn't happen on day 1, and people are impatient, some people when they want something, want it immediately, you can never have that with piracy, with piracy you're not even really guaranteed to get what you want because for you to get it means somebody else has to decide to share it first.
So what the authors do, is they release their story online for free, but then on patreon you can read maybe 5, 10 chapters ahead, it's unlikely for any individual pirate to hound those author's patreons to re-release the content that those authors are gonna make free in a few days or weeks anyways, I haven't even really seen it happen ever.
Basically, volume is one of the best actions that can be taken against piracy, if you make more stuff, the pirates will lag behind the official releases, and the impatient big spender type people who want a thing now will still flock to your patreon with no more action needed from you as the creator. The pirates will still get your stuff, but the ones paying will get it a lot faster.
Instead of playing a game of trying to stop piracy, play the game of offering something better to those who pay, something that won't carry over as easily to piracy.
PS: WIth all this crap about toxic creators wanting to put viruses on pirated vars (they could if they embraced piracy btw, just upload the pirated versions themselves before anyone else does it lol, that's how hackers spread viruses in the first place through piracy, I have personally witnessed someone do exactly this to spread a virus; of course these things do get caught, usually doesn't take that long either, but vars are actually uniquely well suited for this kind of scheme) I'm actually kinda relieved that I alwasy run vam through wine, so the damage such a thing could do is absolutely trivial unless wine users are specifically targeted (which is extremely uncommon; and would still be quite limited in scope even then).
Also I don't think it'd harm VAM at all if some creators released viruses on it. League of Legends' playerbase didn't meaningfully change when they forced everyone to install kernel level chinese spyware to continue playing.
