Getting ready for using Anti-piracy measures.

Copy protection will require your business to take into consideration a number of changes to your End User interaction. This will affect both your support and operations and will be a driver for the decisions you will make in programming the copy protection security.

Your choices here will be driven by your End Users and your business model but they should be made up front before proceeding with protection to ensure you don’t have to make changes later.

Support

This is where the most ‘pain’ will occur if you don’t make the correct preparations and choices before shipping your protected product.

Fortunately because our product has “Protect-n-Forget” (PnF) technology you will avoid the majority of the issues with supporting copy protected software. This means that the End User can make any changes they like, excluding replacing the HDD, to their PC and it will not cause the copy protection to fail and force a re-licensing event. This is important as when a user calls saying they have re-formatted (Windows not Low Level) and the copy protection is not working you can insist this is not one of the problems!

The same applies to making other hardware changes such as LAN card, Motherboard or Memory – none of these or other similar events will cause the protection to fail. UNLIKE ALL OTHER PROTECTION ON THE MARKET.

Operations

Operations will need to decide which type (s) of license generation they are going to use and have the staff trained on issuing licenses and dealing with license problems. In addition, they will need to be able to explain how to ‘move’ licenses between PCs and how to upgrade to a new PC whist keeping the old license.

THE ABILITY TO EASILY UNLOCK PRODUCTS AND MOVE LICENSES IS CRITICAL FOR GOOD PR AND CLIENT RELATIONS.

We provide 4 ways to unlock your protected product:

1. Full Internet Activation (optional)
2. Web based self service activation (optional)
3. Phone (Fax)
4. Email

Your choices here will also affect how you code the protection installation of your products. As our products can also be shipped with Preset Internet activation limits and the use of a demo period before activation you can create a very Customer friendly package out of the box that will take the pressure of Operations.

The first two choices require you to have purchased Internet Licenses, supplied as a text file, that you can issue with your product when you ship – this is another important consideration depending on your distribution model.

These licenses are unique to you and can easily be provided to distributors and ‘download’ sites for them to use on your behalf as well as using them in-house. These licenses can also be printed on your documentation and media as you wish. Of course, you can also supply them in an order confirmation email.

Choices 3 and 4 are more traditional non-internet based way to provide licenses and the tools to provide these unlocking codes are provided free, you get 1 station with the Standard version and 4 with the Pro version. Additional unlocking stations can be purchased.

Be aware that using offline methods are more time intensive and more prone to errors. Please ensure that you allow sufficient staff and resources to service the volume of sales you plan over the next 12 months.

Moving licenses between PCs is also another important consideration and we provide several options here too plus they can be invoked using scripts (provided) or our End User License Manager Program. This is a generically branded tool that allows the End User to perform many useful functions and is provided free for you to ship with your products.

It also allows you to check that licenses have been removed from PCs for refunds or to check claims from End Users that they have ‘lost’ their license.

We provide 4 ways to (re)move licenses using the License Manager and Internet Activate Programs.

1. Using floppy disks
2. Using USB flash drives
3. Using our return to the Internet Server (option)
4. Using the proof of removal procedure

To make this process easier for you to implement we provide you with an End User manual that you can edit and ship with your own documentation that explains how all these processes work in detail.

Marketing/Sales

Our advice from End User surveys is to give your clients 2 user licenses not one, allowing for 2 installs of your software.

This will reduce bad PR and complaints, most users like to have a copy on home/work/portable PCs and you will have a happier Customer as a result. This will allow them to make a “mistake” if they ‘lose’ a license or buy a new PC without transferring the license beforehand.

THIS WILL REDUCE SUPPORT CALLS AND COMPLAINTS

Further, as explained above, Users will not be able to claim further free licenses based on the pre-text that they have re-formatted or changed their PC components – a favorite way to get another license free of charge – as PnF technology will not fail unlike other systems on the market.

This will allow sales to enforce the licensing policy and this will save considerable profits!

A way to check whether the End User actually has a license on their system to avoid PR issues is to use the ‘proof of removal’ tool, this will ensure if they claim to have no license that they indeed remove it before you re-issue one.