OT: copy protection / licensing for Mac?

[Mark Schonewille]

Hi Tiemo,

For a real hacker, not the quantity but the challenge counts.

I created a few installers for clients of mine, some with limited copy  
protection. You might use the CD serial number incombination with the  
MAC address of a network device. You can put a few PHP or Perl scripts  
on a server to create and retrieve a serial number when the software  
is installed for the first time. This isn't too difficult a thing to do.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
http://economy-x-talk.com
http://www.salery.biz

Benefit from our inexpensive hosting services. See http://economy-x-talk.com/server.html 
  for more info.

On 8 aug 2008, at 10:43, Tiemo Hollmann TB wrote:

> Hello,
>
> this topic is already discussed a few times, but I didn't found any
> "satisfying" answers in the archives.
>
> I am looking for a copy protection / or licensing system with a  
> minimum on
> handling / trouble for me which gives a good protection for the  
> average
> user. No protection against cracks is required, because the quantity  
> of my
> publication is too low to be in interest for hackers. I want to  
> build a
> hybrid CD for Mac and Win. Up to now I used ProtectDisc (a german  
> system)
> which is implemented in my runtime exe, so that my app can be run  
> only with
> the original CD (which is ok, because my apps are heavy video apps,  
> where
> the videos always stay on CD. This is a good solution for me,  
> because I
> don't have any maintenance as supplying a licensing server with  
> serial and
> all this activation stuff. BUT this technique is only available for  
> Win ( as
> my CD factory tells me, because the Mac community is "so small"). So  
> that
> the Mac part of my hybrid CD is unsecured and can be copied.
>
> I was already thinking of programming a kind of a "minimum licensing"
> function for the Mac part, as asking any hardware information from the
> system, generating a licence key for this number, which I had to  
> pass to the
> customer. But this would just be a very small obstacle, because any  
> user
> could ask for the licence key, because the users can buy my product in
> standard bookshops as amazon, where I don't have any control, if  
> they bought
> a official copy or if they copied it from a friend.
>
> What are your experiences, which systems do you use for protection /  
> easy
> handling of licensing? Is there at all any copy protection which  
> works for
> both sides of hybrid CDs?
>
> Thanks for sharing your experiences
>
> Tiemo