Piracy

[Chipp Walters]

Hi Robert et al.

I think there are two factors you must consider.

1) Price
How much are you going to charge for the app? If it's under $150, then 
simple schemes should work. IMO, most people who want to rip you off, 
will. What you want is to 'nudge' users from the free/demo/trial version 
to the 'paid for' version.

2) License type
This is actually step-in-step with price. Just about all of Altuit's 
products are licensed to USERS, not COMPUTERS. I believe this is a much 
fairer license, and one I would rather use as a consumer. Robert, you 
and others have tried to create a regCode tied to hardware. While this 
is fine for high priced software, IMO, it hurts only your paying 
customers. Say a hard disk goes out, or a motherboard, then they can't 
install your product. Say they buy a new machine and donate the old one 
to the needy. They can no longer install/use your product. Say they have 
a desktop and a laptop, they can only install it on one. This type of 
license is more 'customer friendly' while also encouraging sales.

I know you can offer them 'multiple keys'-- like MS Office does. Still, 
it is a pain to be a paying customer and ask for a new key, or know you 
only have 3 of them.

If someone wants to steal your software, they will. But making it 
'harder' on paying customers, IMO, is not good business. Just my 2 cents.

best,

Chipp

Robert J. Earp wrote:

> We use embedded code to get the drive serial number the app is loaded on 
> (running from) and scramble it via an algorithm to generate a "challenge 
> key", which we then ask the customer for when registering the product.  
> We then have a little app in-house that generates the unlock key from 
> the challenge key, this app is also a database that keeps track of whom 
> has got what keys.  If it's a downloaded copy we know who purchased it 
> and will log the challenge and resulting unlock keys in case somebody 
> "looses" their unlock key.  


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