Solving today’s Intellectual Property Piracy problems.

As technology and distribution media continued to evolve, the market has produced solutions that break down into four main areas.

Each of these solutions offers its own strengths and weaknesses, but all of them have one thing in common: they are still weapons in the ongoing cat-and-mouse battle between software developers and pirates, and should be constantly evolving.

Beware of copy protection vendors who promise you a totally uncrackable system.

Nevertheless, these systems can help to protect your intellectual property by making it more difficult for pirates to crack them. They can also be used to help control the distribution of your software and offer payment alternatives, such as try before you buy, usage payments, and timed (lease) payments.

Dongles

Considered old hat by most developers, dongles are expensive on a per-product basis because of the extra manufacturing costs involved. They also reduce the flexibility for the end user.

Nevertheless, dongles are still used on more expensive software products where the cost of the protection is in line with the cost of the software, and standard USB key dongles have helped to reduce this price threshold.

For more details about the misconceptions surrounding dongle security, see our quick guide, The Truth about Hardware Dongles.

Media protection

The introduction of media such as CD and DVD has led to commercial duplication systems that introduce deliberate errors into the CD during the burning process. These errors contain patterns that can be used by the program on the CD to check that it is being loaded from the original media. While these systems can yield results, they cannot work effectively with online distribution because there is no media involved.

Crackers have also reportedly circumnavigated various generations of this protection, meaning that it must be constantly updated, just like other systems.

Software wrappers

Evolving from the loader based mechanisms found in some software protection systems, software wrappers are considered by many developers to be among the easiest products to use, because they are often designed to be easily integrated into any product.

However, that ease of use comes at a price. Once cracked, a software wrapper can be countered with an un-wrapper that is easy to distribute and run.

Developers should also be wary of future operating system developments when using wrappers.

Unless you are sure that your wrapper solution will survive Windows XP Service Pack 2 and future operating system upgrades, for example, you could find yourself with increasing support costs in the future.

Software Development Kits

An SDK is a piece of copy protection code that has been developed for a specific application environment.

SDK's are harder to implement than wrapper technology because you must be a developer with the tools that built the original application. They can nevertheless be relatively simple to implement if the correct solution is chosen.

SDK's are stronger and harder to hack than wrappers and much cheaper and more flexible than dongles. They also tend to have more features and integrate with applications much more tightly, allowing for features such as custom screens, for example.

See "Learning from our experience" for the next part of the story...