re how to the disks copy protected in article apr imag fr schaefer imag imag fr arno schaefer writes in article apr w lumina edb tih no ketil edb tih no ketil albertsen tih writes in article apr reed edu mblock reed edu matt block writes i guess what i am saying is that your question is difficult if not impossible to answer what exactly do you want to know do you need a good one for a project you are working on how secure must it be are you trying to crack one that someone else has used i can probably make suggestions assuming the activity is strictly legal in general it is a bad idea legally to tamper with copy protection it can also lead to corruption of files which you necessarily do not have back ups of being as they are copy protected which can be devestating do you have absolutely no ideas for practical applications and are merely curious please clear up those questions and i ll try to help as much as i can may we interpret this as an offer to volunteer as editor for a copy protection faq i am quite sure that i am not alone welcoming such an initiative i will volunteer to ask some of the questions if you will provide the answers hey now will you stop encouraging him copy protection only serves one pur pose to keep the honest buyer from making legal backup copies it will definitely not stop any pirates if you want to protect you soft supply a good documentation and support this is imho the only way of effectively protecting software there are several types of copy protection and the point is to make sure the user is using a legitimate copy the simplest and virtually fool proof way is for the program to somehow fixate itself to the machine it was installed on some sort of checksum serial number whatever so a copy put on a different machine not installed from original disks will not work the program is definitely backupable if restored to the same machine depends on the programmer don t use a disk drive characteristic if the user did an upgrade to the machine he she should reinstall all programs any way no document look up no disk wear and tear i did not say that the originals would allow only one install the user s conscience should do that i know i ll get flamed for this but with the increasing number of casual users who either unknowingly or don t care about the software copyrights it s the truth i have friends who ask me for copies of my latest games all the time and when i refused they went after somebody else casual pirating is becoming more of a problem some sort of copy protection will discourage the casual copying i ve seen what some of my friends dug up somewhere latest and the greatest games all cracked within days of actual release you know how many bytes you need to change in x wing to disable the quiz two yes two and don t ask me which ones they are determined pirates are unstoppable given enough time but their results do not spread that far since pirate boards are not that well known and easily tracked once found by authorities it is the casual pirates that the copy protection is determined to discourage what i believe the companies should do is implement the above plus a special patch once the user registers that loudly exclaims upon bootup registered to xxxxx address city state zip and disables the above two benefits encourages registration cuts down on pirating and makes it more traceable because if the patch s registration message is encrypted it will be quite hard to change and therefore provides a stable trail of who allowed their copy out of their hands and thus violated their license agreement this way the legitimate users who does not register will experience minimal discomfort who does major upgrades to their computer frequently as only problem they have is they won t be able to restore to another computer the registered users would have proven they are legitmate users and therefore gains full rights and can restore to different machines on the other hand the software company now have a record of where this particular copy is supposed to be if this user s copy was found to be somewhere it was not supposed to be we know who has broken their license agreement of course a hacker can break that eventually but that s not the point is it kasey chang
