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From: ericb@athertn.Atherton.COM (Eric Black)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Copy protection and the consumer
Message-ID: <164@teak.athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 23 Jan 88 22:48:18 GMT
References: <4663@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3823@husc6.harvard.edu> <1319@looking.UUCP> <556@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: ericb@Atherton.COM (Eric Black)
Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 40

In article <556@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>It *is* in the interest of the hardware vendor to prevent piracy
>of *their* software.  So you are likely to see hardware serial numbers
>on machines whose manufacturers have a range of unbundled software.

By far, I think, most hardware manufacturers would much rather sell
hardware than software.  In fact, they offer software pretty much only
because they would not be able to sell the hardware without it.  They may
spend significant amounts of money, time, and effort in developing and
supporting this software, but, by and large, if the software did not
sell hardware for them, they would not do it.

Now, given that assumption (which is just that), why would the hardware
manufacturer care if you tried to run the same software on another of
his machines?  Presumably the fact that you are trying to do so means
that he has sold another piece of hardware.  If the manufacturer creates
said software so that it requires the hardware on which it runs, then
he really doesn't want to set up the whole problem of copy protection,
extra manufacturing and support headaches (individualizing each copy of
the software, etc.), and so on.  He wants to sell iron.

I offer as example the Digi-View video digitizer for the Amiga from NewTek.
The software is pretty neat stuff.  And they just upgraded anyone who asked
to the new version essentially for media cost ($10, including a new manual).

No, it's only the software vendors who want their software to run on
generic hardware, and who want to charge prices that encourage copying
of software versus new purchase of software, who want to copy-protect it.

Unfortunately, short of providing decryption built-in to the CPU chip in
the instruction fetch path, the fact is that at some point in the program's
runtime existence, there MUST be a "cleartext" version of the code.  In simpler
protection schemes, at some point in the program's execution it makes a
GO/NO-GO decision as to whether the execution is authorized.  Both can be
defeated by a sufficiently-motivated pirate.

-- 
Eric Black	"Garbage in, Gospel out"
   UUCP:	{sun!sunncal,hpda}!athertn!ericb
   Domainist:	ericb@Atherton.COM