Is there some sort of portable Copy Protection??

I need some advice on how to protect my software from being pirated. There is a lot of software out there that can lock a program to a particular machine, but that may be too severe in my case. Besides, all but 2 of the copy protection schemes I've investigated have been broken.

Here's the problem. The software I'm selling should be portable like a PIM so the user can take with them and run it from different computers, using a USB thumb drive etc.. So I don't see how locking it to a computer hardware is going to help.

I need to serialize it and encrypt the .exe file so the protection I do implement can't be (easily) circumvented. Here's the real problem I can't seem to solve. If someone can run my software on a USB thumb drive and run it on different computers, what's stopping someone from copying the software and giving it to his 10 friends? How do I detect it? I could have a web server that the program contacts once a month or so which could invalidate the license (program stops running) if it could detect if the software was being run by an unlicensed user, but how would it distinguish beteen a valid user running the software on 10 of his machines (internet cafe, office computer, home computer, laptop etc), or 10 different users running the software? Is it possible to get a hardware id from the USB drive and lock it to that piece of hardware? Or should I lock it to the machine and if the user want's to run it on more machines, offer to extend the license to 2 or 3 machines?

TIA
Sam
.

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