Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!nature.berkeley.edu!jim
From: jim@nature.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: Idea for painless copy protection
Keywords: KeyServer LaunchBreak
Message-ID: <1991Jan27.170442.19912@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 27 Jan 91 17:04:42 GMT
References: <1991Jan27.144523.20674@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: Jim Bradley
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of California
Lines: 33

In article <1991Jan27.144523.20674@phri.nyu.edu> roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>
>	Let's say I wanted to market commercially a Mac program and have
>some way to discourage pirating.  Copy protection is out, since it doesn't
>allow for backups, or lost/damaged distribution media.  But, what if I did
>the following?
>
>	When the program starts up, it installs something which listens for
>broadcast packets to a specific port (my knowledge of appletalk is sketchy,
>but this is easy to do in IP and I'm assuming AT has some similar
>mechanism).  The program then sends out a broadcast packet to that port and
>listens for any responses.  The responses it would get back would contain
>the serial number of other copies of the program installed elsewhere on the
>same AT network.  If any S/N matched that of this copy, it would refuse to
>run. ...

Already been done, at least twice.   Check out KeyServer (developed by 
Denis Devlin of Dartmouth, and used on thousands of machines there).
It is now marketed by Sassafras Software.

  Contact: Denis Devlin at Sassafras Software, Inc.,   
  PO Box 150, Hanover, NH, 03755 (603) 643-3351. 
  Internet: denisd@dartmouth.edu
  Bitnet: DDEVLIN@DARTCMS1.BITNET
  AppleLink: D4989

KeyServer handles the details a bit differently from what Roy Smith outlines,
but essentially provides the same functionality.

LaunchBreak, developed at the University of Michigan, also provides the
fuctionality Roy Smith describes.  It is free.

Jim Bradley, CNR Computer Facility, UC Berkeley