Choosing a software copy protection vendor.

Although all software publishers face the same challenges from pirates and crackers, the techniques for meeting these challenges will differ according to the nature of your business. Each business is different and should weigh up various criteria when deciding on a copy protection mechanism:

Does the technology support your development environment?

Many vendors support only one or two environments, while some of the wrapper solutions will work with anything and don't require coding at all.

Remember that the easier it is to protect something, then the easier it is to remove that protection. Many SDKs require lots of implementation work on the part of the developer, and some require a server configured with technologies such as CGI. This can present problems, especially if sharing a server with your ISP's other customers.

Cheaper solutions are likely to require more customization work on the part of the software developer, potentially increasing development costs.

Consider your end users

Many of the more recent SDKs require a permanent or semi-permanent Internet connection to control licenses, making life difficult for many companies' customers.

Consider a solution offering a one-off Internet activation process with the ability to work offline afterwards. Such web-based licensing should also be manually accessible using a web-based forms interface to avoid problems accessing built-in activation services across corporate firewalls.

If you are selling to corporate clients, your copy protection technology must cope with multi-PC deployments. Image builds and PC 'lock downs', which are frequent in corporate environments, can cause copy protection to fail.

What is your product's price point?

Automating the licensing process is vital if you are to avoid incurring huge management overheads.

Options here include Internet web-based licensing and automated email. If you are selling small volumes, then it would be good to combine the above features with an activation service from the vendor that works out of the box with your SDK on a pay-as-you-go basis to save costs.

If your product is a high-cost, low-volume offering, you may want to consider a USB dongle, but evaluate your cost model carefully. Dongles can cost a considerable amount per user compared to pennies for software solutions. We believe the pure software SDKs on the market are just as good and cost less.

See "What is the state of the art" for the next part of the story...