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Path: utzoo!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Re: Copy Protection - a case study
Message-ID: <467@looking.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Dec-85 03:22:56 EST
Article-I.D.: looking.467
Posted: Sun Dec 15 03:22:56 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Dec-85 06:47:12 EST
References: <3624@think.UUCP> <131300002@ima.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 36
Summary: 

In article <31@gumby.UUCP> kucharsk@gumby.UUCP writes:
>> 	(c) On EVERY distributed diskette, include (somewhere)
>> 	    in the code an encrypted serial number. Keep a
>> 	    record of which user has which serial number.
>

A quick note here - this also eliminates dealer sales, since dealers can't
and won't do your paperwork for you here.  You'll only get people who
send in their registration cards.  Very few.

>
>
>  The
>best way of reducing loss to piracy is to provide good programs at low prices.

I have heard several people say this.  Why do they say it?  Is there some
evidence for it?  It seems to me that the better a program is, the more
likely it is to be stolen.  Are programs like popular games, flight
simulators and other cheap products stolen less?  I doubt it.  Turbo
Pascal is stolen a lot, and the only reason that many don't steal it is
that the manual has been made deliberately hard to photocopy.

>And as radical as this seems, another good way is to not protect it at all.
>The majority of pirates out there are in it somewhat for the prestige, and
>it's a lot more prestigious to say that you had to crack the copy protection
>and remove the serial number than to say "Oh, I just got out the diskcopy
>program on the master disk."

But the kid pirates who steal for fun are not the main complaint on
some groups of software, although they are on many of my commercial products.
For a program like Lotus, it's the business where one copy zoomed around the
department that caused the real damage.


-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473