Slashdot Mirror
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?"
No matter how much DRM you put on it it will always be removed. The best thing to do is concentrate on adding value for paying customers. Do an on-launch check against the serial number over the Internet. If no Internet is available up to X number of times then launch without it. This is similar to what DOOM 3 by id Software does. If the same serial number is showing up too often then ban it. Basically: you're a niche - put a little DRM on it, enough so that a normal user wouldn't notice it at all ideally but at the same time that just enough that it would need to be cracked for every version for illegitimate users.
Shh.
You obviously don't have much experience with software at the business level. The $10k usually includes support, upgrades, etc. It's not like they're charging $10,000 for a basic word processor.
I agree. At $OLD_DAYJOB, we sold software for about the same price per perpetual floating license. Early versions of our software used password protection which was easily circumvented, then a software key based system (quickly cracked) and you could find those versions of our software all over TPB. After a major overhaul to the software, we incorporated WIBU key dongles and peppered our code with various kinds of dongle interactions. There were literally thousands of license checks. There was also encrypted data stored in the key itself that instructed the program how to run. In three years of working there, I never ran across a single instance of our new software being successfully cracked. We were very happy with this, especially considering we sold the full version (at huge discount) to students, and had several commercial and academic customers in China.
The only problems I ever had with piracy of our software included a guy who had the old version who came onto our forums asking for help, apparently not realizing we knew who every one of our customers were. We also had some students at a Canadian university install pirated software on lab computers. The installations phoned home to say "I've been installed!" (there was nothing nefarious, it was designed to do this as part of the registration process) and we noticed that the school wasn't licensed for that version. Their IT department was very helpful in tracking down those responsible.
Good luck.