Best practice to prevent software copy

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm developping an application and I'm looking for some cool informations about protecting it against copy ! Do you guys know some book/articles/any informations about it ?

Thanks in advance for your advices !

Answer 1

If your software is good, someone will find a way to copy it no matter what you do.

If your software is no good, nobody will bother to copy it.

Most of my software falls in the second category, so I've never bothered with copy protection. Many believe that this is an endeavor not worth the effort.

Answer 2

Rick Brewster of Paint.NET has a few articles that talk about some of the issues that he has had with people copying Paint.NET code. Here are a couple of articles, I'm sure a search will reveal more:

http://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet-v35/ http://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of-%E2%80%9Cbackspaceware%E2%80%9D/

Answer 3

Have incentives to not copying it.

For instance, Xbox 360 games, that are easily copied, and executed on modded boxes, now tend to bundle codes in the box that unlocks downloadable content in-game. These codes are of course only available to people actually buying the game.

So your best option is to make it a better deal for the guy that buys your software, than it is for the people copying it.

Having said that, that option might not be possible or easily done, in which case you should avoid giving your paying customers too hard a time. For instance, if you add serial numbers with online activation and limited number of activations before they need to call you or sit waiting for you to answer an email, I can guarantee that this way will hurt more than just ignoring the people that copy your software in the first place.

The worst option you can go for is the one that will make some of your paying customers wish they hadn't.

Answer 4

In addition to Carl's comment I want to add that a rigid copy protection system can make users really annoyed and so a good software becomes a bad software.

Other than that it really depends on the software what to do - can you expect internet connectivity or might the application be running in a data center behind many firewalls? If the net is available an auto-update service is a nice way to track usage - while you should take privacy into consideration then. Otherwise some random serial number process is often good enough: Those who take the effort to bypass it most likely won't buy the software anyways and for others copy and pasting a serial number might be acceptable. But then again: It depends on the software and the users and ...

Punishing the paying users and making it harder to use the software legally than illegally certainly won't work out.

Answer 5

see: how-do-you-protect-your-software-from-illegal-distribution

Answer 6

Yeah I'm quite annoyed with that part... It's a small application, I will certainly sell it but I want to keep the price low and affordable !

I was thinking about a simple serial number... I don't want online activation as well, because I don't want to annoy users that don't have any internet connection (pretty rare I know, but as said Johannes, I don't want to make it harder for paying users)...

I'll have a look at mlsteeves' links !

Anyway, thanks a lot for all your answers !