Re: Licences 101 - Copy Protection for Newbies
Re: Licences 101 - Copy Protection for Newbies
- Subject: Re: Licences 101 - Copy Protection for Newbies
- From: Eric Dahlman <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 10:03:00 -0500
On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 09:25 AM, Sherm Pendley wrote:
On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 09:57 AM, Steven M.Palm wrote:
this with some hashing against a hardware value to store a disk file
key for future checking "are we legal" during program runs, and you
have something that might slow down the serial posters, and defeat
the ability to pass around the disk license file from machine to
machine.
I can't argue against the effectiveness of this, but I would like to
point out that end users often have a perfectly legitimate need to
pass a license from one machine to another: hardware upgrades. Having
to relicense software after buying a new computer is an inconvenience.
Also, many users - myself included - consider the installation of an
application on multiple machines to be "fair use," so long as I'm the
only user, and only one copy of it is in use at a time. When I buy a
CD, I'm legally able to listen to it on any player that I own; I see
no particular reason why software should be treated differently.
As a user one licensing scheme that I have really liked creates a
license file for the application which includes information about the
licensee and the features allowed along with a digital signature of
the license file. This is nice in that the license is just a file and
can be copied around sent through email and the such just fine. That
lets me feel secure in the knowledge that I can backup my licenses and
a crashed hard drive or and act-of-3-year-olds won't munch my data.
This type of scheme has the added bonus of helping keep honest people
honest if say when the program starts a little splash screen pops up
and says "Licensed to Joe Blow" Mr. Blow will be a little less willing
to give away his license to strangers since it will be indelibly[1]
marked as his.
-Eric
[1] For sufficiently large values of indelible. ;-)
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