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Ask Slashdot: Copy Protection Advice For ~$10k Software?
An anonymous reader writes I'm part owner of a relatively small video editing software company. We're not yet profitable, and our stuff turned up on thePirateBay recently. Some of our potential paying customers are using it without paying, and some non-potential customers are using it without paying. Our copy protection isn't that tough to crack, and I'd rather see the developers working on the product than the DRM (I'm convinced any sufficiently desirable digital widget will get copied without authorization). Would it be insane to release a 'not for commercial use' copy that does some spying and reporting on you, along with a spy-free version for ~$10,000? I feel like that would reduce the incentive to crack the paid version, and legit businesses (In the US anyway but we're trying to sell everywhere) would generally pay and maybe we could identify some of the people using it to make money without paying us (and then sue the one with the biggest pockets). What would you do?"
You could employ Kneecaps-R-Us to persuade the pirates from pirating.
after 10 min just pop up a random passage from the user manual and make the user find the correct page. the longer the manual, the more effective this is. alternatively, devise a strange set of symbols and provide the user with a high tech spinning paper wheel so they can "decode". this isn't rocket science here ; )
And if you use it, USE IT PROPERLY, bake in the encryption into your software so it becomes fiendishly difficult to crack (it will never be impossible.)
You must be new to the internets. The crack will be up on pirate bay (etc etc) by the end of the week. Why waste the time and money on something guaranteed not to work?
Ah HA! What if they go with a hardware dongle and they ship said dongles using a method that takes longer than a week to get there?
Ha! See that? You little internet punks think you're soooooo clever, don't you?
It's easy to find out. Put some hidden checks in the code that don't seem to do anything, but really run a checksum against the executable. If anyone hacks it, all will seem to go well until the project is exported, at which point a single frame depicting male genitalia will be inserted every few minutes randomly. I don't think the customer will appreciate being dick-rolled, especially if that video finds its way into a television broadcast before the problem is detected.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Have you ever done any video editing? You do realize that video editing is resource intensive? If you tried to run the software from a remote server it would be an absolute performance nightmare. You'd be famous for creating the slowest video editing software known to man.
I agree, however, that remote execution is the only way to prevent your software from getting cracked. Essentially the program never leaves the company servers. Crackers can't crack what they don't have. Another "solution" is to release software that is so bad or that does something so useless that no one will bother to crack it. Or there is always security through obscurity. Don't tell anyone about the software. Keep it a secret. If people don't know about the existence of the software they can't crack it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.