Re: Is there some sort of portable Copy Protection??

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.

Forget about protecting yourself from anything more than casual piracy -- people giving the program to friends. This frees you from needing to do anything spectacular to get your system reasonably secured.

Here are some ideas:

1) Lock the program to a name and/or a company using a registration code. Display this name prominently on anything that prints, in the title bar and about box, and perhaps on your welcome screen.

2) Make the registration code date sensitive. That is, require that the registration code be entered within a reasonable period of time (say, 2 weeks). This means that even if the registration code gets out into the wild, people can't register your product after 2 weeks. This does bring up the possibility of people wanting to reinstall the product later on. In this case, you can create an automatic server process that sends out the current code, validates it as a legit code, and returns a new generated code that's valid for a day or two, all of which is managed directly by the software. This way you can blacklist codes that get out so they can't be used to regenerate new codes. Also, have a policy of generating new codes on request quickly if the server goes down. Monitor the requests to ensure no one is abusing it, and if they do, blacklist it and wait for them to email you (or, alternately, email them to ask if they're having problems!)

3) Most PIM users are not programmers or hackers, so don't worry about serializing the EXE or encrypting it or whatever. It's a waste of time that won't slow down real hackers.

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Tim Sullivan
Unlimited Intelligence Limited
http://www.uil.net

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