How does your employer limit/prevent pirating of its products?
Some have the view that piracy can be good because of the market share and exposure it gives. Sure these are benefits but they come at a cost.
Do you use any anti-piracy software or methods to protect your products and why/why not?
I think you need to weigh up a number of factors in deciding on software protection, and how invasive or inconvenient the measures will be.
The most invasive (and expensive to implement) measure is the hardware dongle. I doubt this is used much any more because of the huge cost and inconvenience. You need to manufacture a piece of hardware for every machine the software will run on. Legitimate users can be left in the dark should their dongle malfunction, or should they lose or break the dongle. You then need to ship them a replacement. Finally, skilled crackers can patch the portions of your software that query the dongle, rendering the scheme useless. This was typically used in the most expensive software products (AutoCAD for example). From the user point of view this means their software can expire at any time, and if your company goes out of business, eventually the software can no longer be used (legally anyway).
Note: Games manufacturers are still persisting in trying to make the CD a form of hardware dongle, and this can create much consumer frustration, as the methods they use can make the CD hard (if not impossible) to read in some drives, and usually install many shady "device drivers" onto the system to try and prevent workarounds.
The next most invasive, although much cheaper to implement, is on-line activation. The software will typically generate a unique identifier code for the PC it is installed upon, and will send this to the activation server which will give it an unlock code, allowing it to run only on this machine. Windows XP is an example of this. While there is not a piece of hardware to manufacture, lose, or break, this scheme still poses problems for users. Any time they need to move the software to a new machine or re-install their current PC, or even change the hardware configuration enough, they need to re-activate. Also, if they don't have internet access (Yes, this does still happen!) you need a backup scheme, like a call center, where they can phone in their Machine code and have an operator read them their unlock code. This scheme also means that if your company closes or shuts down the activation servers, the software is effectively dead in the water unless the protection is cracked.
Less invasive still is a one-time unlock code that can be applied to the software regardless of the machine it is on. This has a number of advantages for both the user and the software distributor. Firstly, much less support is required since the only problem that can arise is the user losing this code, which you can automatically e-mail them again or read over the phone. This does make piracy a lot easier, but you can mitigate this by branding their name or company name into an obvious place on the software, making it easy to tell whether it has been pirated or not. This method also means that your software can never "expire" on the user as long as they keep the unlock code.
Least invasive is no protection at all. I think that if you are trying to sell a commercial product, this is not going to work. Piracy may increase legitimate sales, since the more people are using the product, the more are likely to buy it, but this same effect can be achieved by allowing a 30 day (or other reasonable period) unlimited trial of the software, and then requiring the activation code. Yes, this can be bypassed, but the people who are prepared to pay for the software are usually not going to go to the effort of bypassing your unlock scheme.
Bottom line: there is no foolproof protection mechanism, and the more foolproof you try and make your mechanism, the more you will irritate your legitimate buyers, and the more support you will need to give, thus making your whole operation less profitable.
End of the very long rant. (Steve Yegge, you now have competition! At least in terms of word count.)
I truly believe that nowadays (and probably, before) software value is based more on the support and agregated services than it is on the code itself. It may very well deppend uppon the kind of software you are building so, if your piece of software is mainstream (read: Operative System, Design software etc.) chances are that your software will be used ilegally more than a specialized accounting application or an e-government software.
For companies like Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe etc its harder because there are tons of forums, pdf's, screencasts, ebooks and videos (sometimes "pirated", too) that you can rely on to make good use of the software so you might not need "the support" of the company.
In the case of ISV's and small software companies the software is very specific for a market and most of the times crackers and people in general who make a living of ilegal software won't care too much of your application since users are more akin to look for, say, windows vista, than for your "x-company accounting software" therefore, they won't spend time to crack your software because 99.8% of the market just would not care.
As for the "big" companies I think they live from the "real" customers. The average user, the one that surfs the web and download stuff will probably be using unlicensed versions of a plethora of software because... well they just don't care, they use the computer as amusement but for someone that uses the software as a tool in order to generate revenue they will see this software as an investment and they know for sure that they better pay their licenses so the day the server goes down they have someone to call instead of waiting for a cracked patch while you loose customers/sales.
It may very well deppend on the budget of your company, most companies don't have the time or resources to create anti-piracy solutions or buy them, but I guess that for ISV's it may be safe to ship your product without it, at the end, if someone's want to use your software without paying they will, on the other hand, those who understand that your product is a tool and not something you download from cnet know that the added value (support number, manuals, updates, etc) is what the human resources of your company can do for them that, for me, is the 50% of the final product.
In my company, we don't use it. We operate in a niche market with a small number (10-20) of customers, so there is a high transparency. Our management believes that we would find out if some customers used unlicensed copies.
In order to decide if you want invest into a protection (either your time by developing one yourself, or your money by buing one), you need to see if it is worth the effort financially.
For any protected software used by more than a few hundred people, you can find a cracked version. So far, every protection scheme can be tampered with. On the other hand, not every (potential) customer knows how to find the cracked versions, so using a protection scheme will probably reduce the number of pirated version.
The big unknowns are:
Provide software as a service and never care about piracy again. Thats the only business model that WILL work. Everything else is stupidly ignorant.
It's highly illogical to create an artifical shortage of something that is only bits and bytes that can be copied easily.
But I guess the average ivory tower manager crackpot will never understand that.