Re: Is there some sort of portable Copy Protection??
- From: "IanUK" <ian.nospamforme.rowe@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 09:14:28 -0000
Hi Sam,
If you are just interested in keeping honest customers honest, a
surprisingly effective scheme is to use a licence name and licence number
scheme. The licence name should contain something personal to the customer
like their company name, e-mail address or similar, and then within the
licence number you give them you can store a checksum to this information.
When your app starts up you can then show "registered to" on a splash
screen, or about screen or somewhere prominent (in fact the more prominent,
the more effective it will probably be), or perhaps include this information
on printouts generated by the app. The key thing about this method is it
doesn't prevent one of your customers from giving his licence name and
number to someone else, but it does make them much less likely to want to
due to the fact that their e-mail address & company name is contained within
the licence. The licence can be portable by simply putting it in an ini
file that can be moved around with your application.
This method makes no attempt to beat pro hackers or people who will download
serial number generators (and I'm not sure you can ever cost effectively
beat this class of pirate) but it is quite low-tech and easy to implement,
doesn't require an activation server, and won't annoy the hell out of your
honest customers.
HTH,
Ian
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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