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How Can Software be Protected from Piracy ?

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: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Saturday March 22 2014, @01:54PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Saturday March 22 2014, @01:54PM (#19693) Homepage Journal

    Expected, considering a study a book publisher did a couple of years ago. He wanted to know how badly piracy was hurting sales so he commissioned a study. Unlike a movie or song it takes a few weeks for a book to be scanned, OCRed and uploaded so they looked for a dip in sales when the book hit the internet.

    Rather than a dip in sales there was a spike in sales. Piracy results in more revenue.

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 23 2014, @04:13AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday March 23 2014, @04:13AM (#19879) Homepage

    That would be Baen, I presume.

    What they also found was that suddenly there was renewed demand for older stuff. Which meant not only was Baen profiting, their authors were profiting, from works that normally would be past their shelf life.

    Baen found this all so enlightening, that they started releasing big swaths of their stuff on redistributable CDs, as a bonus with printed works. Frex:
    http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ [thefifthimperium.com]

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    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.