Re: Serial number verification / obfuscation (was: Re: Hiding
Re: Serial number verification / obfuscation (was: Re: Hiding
- Subject: Re: Serial number verification / obfuscation (was: Re: Hiding
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 09:11:59 -0400
on 02-07-28 8:30 AM, Finlay Dobbie at email@hidden wrote:
>
On Sunday, July 28, 2002, at 01:25 PM, Pierre-Olivier Latour wrote:
>
>
> What would you do if you knew one of your customers has put his serial
>
> on
>
> the internet?
>
>
Call your lawyer? ;-)
And pony up a $10,000 retainer before your lawyer will do any work, and be
prepared to replenish it with another $10,000 after a couple of weeks. And,
by the way, "your lawyer" will probably have to be admitted to practice in
the state or country where the perpetrator lives, because that's where
you'll probably have to file the lawsuit.
Registration numbers are about not having to call your lawyer. Calling the
police is free, but it isn't likely to do much good.
Ambrosia's Snapz Pro requires you to download a new serial number every few
months. I hate it when my number expires 30,000 feet over Des Moines and I
have work to do. This might be a feasible technique if your expiration
routine gave a customer a couple weeks' notice that the serial number is
about to expire.
The technique I like best among the various solutions I've read about is
this: Come out with frequent updates, and monitor the bad-guy sites for
stolen serial numbers so you can invalidate them in each update. I would
accompany this with a prominent warning in my documentation that this will
happen, in order to discourage my customers from deliberately or carelessly
giving away their serial numbers. If they upgrade and discover that their
serial number no longer works, it's their burden to convince me to give them
a new one, not my burden to try to do something to them. I might even write
into the documentation that there will be a fee for replacing serial
numbers, and that I reserve complete discretion to refuse to give out a new
serial number if I'm not satisfied about the user's bona fides. Anything to
let customers know that they'll have to go to some work and expense if
they're careless or worse.
The only downside is that you have to make sure your update always adds
really attractive new functionality. That isn't just to make the bad guy
want it, but also to reduce the market for stolen serial numbers for the old
version. You could even give away old versions free yourself. Frequent
updates keep you in the news, and free older versions can lead to more sales
of the newer versions (like shareware; try it out and see if you like it).
You could put such warnings in your documentation even if you don't actually
monitor the bad-guy sites, or only monitor them sporadically. But it would
be best if somebody wrote an application that automatically monitors the
bad-guy sites, with routines to make it easy to add sites to monitor and
routines to make it easy to identify all kinds of references to your product
on the monitored sites.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook -
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Vermont Recipes -
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Croquet Club of Vermont -
http://members.valley.net/croquetvermont
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