Looking for registration Lock/Unlock Article or Book
Greetings...
I'm writing shareware using VB3.0 and I am looking for a piece of
literature that will tell me the best route to go with a registration
limit idea. I've seen a lot of software that will help me with this
idea, but I'd like to write it myself to learn the technique.
Another route I'd like to go is a remote unlock that will write a
registered copy of the program to disk... with "copystop" implemented.
Am I making a mountain out of a rise in the road???, or is this "fairly"
easy.
Any ideas or help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Dave
Hey Dave, You know of course that Any kind of locking scheme you
choose will/can be overcome and if your software is worth copying it
will be, regardless of what you do to attempt to stop it. All you have
to do for proof is look on any of the alt.whatever.warez sites and there
you will find literally megabytes devoted to this. As a proffesional
programmer myself I know that Your best defense, really, is simply this:
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your
door. Witness: Any good software simply sells itself. People will BUY
it and register it simply because it is good and they want to be able to
upgrade it. Devote your time to making a great product that is worth
buying. You will spend more time and effort trying to safeguard your
product than it is worth. The point of diminishing returns comes when
It costs more to lock up your product than it did to simply sell it at a
lower price. I know that this sounds a bit phylosophical, but there are
plenty of real life examples to draw this conclusion from.
One simple example comes to mind: ID Software and DOOM.
Witness: A company releases a product that is tottally open. No copy
protection, no restrictions on the kinds of levels you can run with it.
They Sell litterally millions of them. Why? Because the game was so
good that so many people who have no interest in pirating WILL buy it
off the shelf in the local K-mart just so they can run the hundreds of
thousands of levels that they can download from just about anywhere.
Those guys all drive TWO lamborgini's now and own 3 houses each!
Success (.) Did they worry about people pirateing the software? Hell
no! They wanted people to spread it around as much as possible.
Second example: Autodesk and autocad. Autodesk had a good product in
the late 80's. New versions were coming out just about every six months
and they were making a killing on the upgrade market. They were
considered to be the very top of the computerized CAD software. Then,
they installed a parrallel port lock to keep people from running
multiple copies on different machines. OVERNIGHT they spawned a whole
industry devoted to cracking their locking scheme. just 2 weeks after
they implemented the port lock, I was downloading a patch off a local
BBS that would defeat it! 2 weeks later, I downloaded a program that
would fool the port into thinking that it had a lock on it! Totally
worthless. Autodesk lost half of their customers nearly overnight and
by the time they removed the lock from thier next version, it was too
late. Other companies had managed to get a wopping market share on
their turf. Autodesk lost their spot and has since never reclaimed it.
If you need any other proof, just ask yourself, what companies these
days are really big and do they do IT? What companies do it, and are
they really big?
Kanda'
{[*=-: The Lord High Mage :-=*]}
Dragonseeker
