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Software Protection

The Battle Against Pirates

Issue: 6.2 (January/February 2008)
Author Bio: Bob is the Vice-President of BKeeney Software Inc.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 5,584
Starting Page Number: 39
Article Number: 6217
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

You think you've created the killer application and it does "it" better than anything on the market. You're about ready to put it on your website and your partner (the sensible one) asks you how you're protecting your software from pirates. Hopefully you've thought about it already, but, in case you haven't, we'll go over some of the solutions.

There are many alternatives to consider. The simplest to devise is a registration code that requires the user to enter their name and a registration code based on an algorithm. The registration code depends upon the users name, and your application simply uses your algorithm to get the registration code and compares it to what they've entered -- there is no internet involved. It's an exceptionally easy thing to implement and this is a sensible first step as you really don't know how well your software will sell. There are many examples on the internet, including one at RBLibrary.com. I would recommend adding a black list so any registration codes you, or anyone else, find on the internet will get disabled in the next application update.

The simple registration code doesn't help if multiple people are using the same name and registration code in the same office. At this point, you could add a simple UDP (auto discovery) class that broadcasts to all computers on the network the name and registration code and if it detects any other instances of those codes it shuts the app down.

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