Comment by ang_cire

Sure. One example of a path, that many people are already doing, is a system like Patreon.

The old model of server-locked licensed software is going the way of the dodo pretty fast right now, though people may not realize it if they're not hunting for alternatives to the old guard suites yet.

And while personally I agree with the commenter above you for personal reasons, I also think that the OP is missing that while the people who've ripped their js tool may have done so directly from their site, no one certainly has to any more: they can likely black-box something similar pretty quickly, at which point the author's DMCA moat is gone.