What's the Right Amount of Copy Protection?

WPIDalamar writes "I'm currently working on a piece of commercial software that will be available through a download and will use a license key to activate it. The software is aimed at helping people schedule projects and will be targeted mostly to corporate users. With the recent Windows Vista black screen of death, it got me thinking about what sort of measures I should go through to prevent unauthorized users from using the software. While I don't wish to burden legitimate users, I do want to prevent most piracy. How much copy protection is appropriate? Is it acceptable for the software to phone home? If so, what data is appropriate to report on? The license key? Software version? What about a unique installation ID? Should I disable license keys for small amounts of piracy, like when there's 3 active installations of the software? What about widespread piracy where we detect dozens or hundreds of uses of the same license key? Would a simple message stating the software may be pirated with instructions on how to purchase a valid license be sufficient?"

Comments

A license key is enough.

[Draconix]

A license key is enough to discourage the casual pirate (custom encryption and multiple variables helps, such as name + password instead of just password) while, from my experience, not being enough to discourage regular users. Entering a key once and not worrying about it ever again is normal enough, and not bothersome. Going beyond that is asking for some glitch to cause legit customers to be calling you up to ask what the hell just caused their copy of your software to invalidate, or why they can't install it on their new computer, etc. Most importantly, it will also encourage people to crack your protection, thus making the pirate version more appealing to the end user.

Don't require a connection

[dargaud]

I worked with equipment that was 3000+km and 10 months away from the closest internet connection, so anything that requires a net-activated key is an absolute no-no. We are still using Win2K for that purpose, and more Linux all the time (although you have to select a distro that won't try to download itself all over again once a week).

You don't need to go this far: I spent the last 3 weeks on the road with my laptop: Matlab ceased to function as soon as the license key manager got out of touch of the license server. I hate that macromedia shit.

Re:None at all

[lukas84]

I disagree, even though just on a tiny bit.

Businesses tend to purchase software they need, yes, but extending of software licenses is often overlooked.

e.g. they buy 5 licenses of your software. A year later, a team member is added to the team using said software. Now there are 6 users. Over time, many more people than the original number of licenses will use the software.

This doesn't happen in all Businesses, but the smaller the more often.

A good idea would be to add "soft activation". This means customer have to activate your software, and the number of currently active machines counted. Deactivating machines should be running a simple tool that removes the software and decrements the activation count on the server. Activation should never fail (even if the activation server is unreachable), but the customer should be reminded if he is running unlicensed software. This way, you can make sure that users don't mistakenly use to many licenses.

Criminal elements will of course find ways around this, so i wouldn't bother with making the activation process very secure - it's essentially just a license counter for your honest customers.

Re:Give it away for free

[Anonymous Coward]

You can make tons of money on service contracts. Spoken like somebody who has never run a software development company.

The fact is most companies will not make tons of money on support. If people are not willing to pay for the software up front, they are not willing to pay for support. I will take my former employer as an example. They purchased one copy of RHEL and had a support contract in place for that one copy. They installed it on over 200 machines.

My current company charges $100 per agent and $20 per agent/year for support. We often get requests from people asking if we have a free or open source version. We have had people make comments that they would gladly pay for support if we had a free version. Based on experience, that is a lie and these people want something for nothing. We have business expenses to cover and cannot rely on support fees that may not show up.

That trick never works.

[porkchop_d_clown]

So, by way of example, I wrote an un-copy-protected software package and released it as "guiltware" - I asked them to click on the paypal link and make a donation to MDA through me. 5 years on, I know people are still using it because I get help requests.

But not one person ever, ever, ever clicked the link.