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posted by janrinok on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the questions-without-answers dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Echoing a question asked on programmers.stackexchange.com - How can software be protected from piracy ?

It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy than a "serial number/activation key." I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. Can there exist a fool-proof and hack-proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, could it be theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, can hackers always find a way around it ?"

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ancientt on Saturday March 22 2014, @03:47AM

    by ancientt (40) <ancientt@yahoo.com> on Saturday March 22 2014, @03:47AM (#19595) Homepage Journal

    You can't sell a series of bits that can be copied easily without having some people decide to skip the buying part. However, you can sell the service that your software provides if you run the software on your own computers to provide the service your customers want. Google, Facebook, Twitter etc prove this. You might be able to get any of those systems to run on your own computers but the service they provide isn't the same as the software they use to provide it. The key to making big money with software is not to sell the software, but run it to provide the service that you do sell.

    On the other hand, if you provide software that people can run on their own computers at a reasonable price and provide good service and regular updates to your customers, most will be willing to pay for it. I was working for a small software company (golden geek card to you if you can name it) which provided software which was useful on its own. It came with basic piracy prevention and an activation process to remove a "demo" watermark. I still remember the call where the customer explained that he had been paying for the software but hadn't gotten the paid version because it was so easy to bypass the protection. I was shocked because I hadn't realized how easy it was to remove the protection and at the same time, my faith in humanity was a little renewed to know that even people who could steal wouldn't necessarily steal simply because it was easy.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:55PM (#19708)

    There are many revenue models for software, and the online-service-with-advertising model such as Google et. al. use certainly can be successful. But it doesn't apply to every case. In particular, it only works for very large user bases. Maybe they get a fraction of a cent or whatever for each page view. Essentially, advertising is an efficient form of micro-payment. But those folks are all trying to figure out how to best monetize mobile, which isn't well suited to advertising due to the high premium that users place on screen space.

    OTOH, if you sell specialized software in small volume, this sort of model doesn't work at all. My experience has been that most users won't pay unless you motivate them. There certainly are exceptions. One of my customers got what he needed from the trial version, then paid for the real thing out of gratitude. Very nice - and very exceptional.

    In my own case, I'm unlikely to pay unless I have to simply due to the time and trouble involved, even though I've been on the other side of that. For example, I used WinZip for many years but never paid for it because they never made me, though I would have if they had. Luckily, 7-Zip came along to relieve my guilt.

    Piracy may actually be part of a business plan, as has been mentioned with Microsoft. A related example is authors who provide their book for free in .pdf form on the web in order to help sell copies. In effect, buying it is a form of supportive donation. But I don't think it works for everybody. There's a reason that various forms of DRM still exist: although it doesn't work in every case, it still works in selected cases. For example, I use Matlab via a Flex license, and each time we run out of license seats (which is purely artificial scarcity) we are a little more motivated to buy more seats. Meanwhile, the Matlab folks nearly give away the student version (to sell expensive seats when students become professionals), and, of course, Octave, a high-quality Matlab clone, is available for free. But I can't imagine the Matlab revenue going up if they removed the Flex license.