#Liquid Speed
Was your empty reply to me a mistake or a comment on my message?<g>
There was a copy protection scheme that was floated around for foreign use but
never put into production that would have wiped whatever hard disk it found if
it detected an illegal copy. It was never deployed for a couple of reasons, the
major one supposedly being the nightmare scenario: A legitimate, paid-up user
has a hardware of software glitch that causes the protection software to tag
his copy as a bootleg, and the disk is wiped. Said legit user immediately goes
ballistic and calls his lawyer who sues the software company. The opinion at
the time was that the clause in the license agreement that excludes "indirect,
incidential, special, or consequential damages" would **NOT** be cover this
case because the damage was, in effect, intentional and maybe negligent. A
system like this could be very expensive for the software companies involved.
As I see it there are several kinds of piracy: (1) somebody like a business
that either buys one copy of a package and makes copies for all of their
machines, or gets a bootleg copy and never buys one at all. (2) somebody that
gets a bootleg copy for casual use. (3) Somebody that
has a temporary bootleg – they borrow a copy while waiting for their copy to
arrive or be ordered through their purchasing department. (4) somebody that
makes and distributes (or worse, sells) copies of somebody else's software.
All 4 are at least technically illegal, but the smart enforcement efforts
should target cases (4) and (1) primarily. These represent REAL lost sales and
financial damage to the copyright holder. Case (2) is clearly illegal, but
most often does not represent a lost sale (this is where SPA's numbers are
inflated, I think). There are a lot of "collectors" out there that don't
actually use the software that they acquire. Case (3) should probably be
overlooked because the user "gets legal" in a very short time.
Good, thick manuals and tech support do more to eliminate case (1) than
anything else, dongels included. If you counterfeit disks, you'll counterfeit
manuals, so (4) is an enforcement problem entirely.
Short of a real CPU ID and a method for linking software to that ID (with a
provision for upgrading machines and moving the software at no/low cost) a
dongle or dongle board or dedicated dongle port isn't a bad way to go. I've
used software with floating licenses on networked Unix machines, and it works,
but it requires some type of CPU ID.
Chris