About Software Pirating Prevention
Making software can be expensive---you need an original idea, a solid team of programmers and a team of interface designers. All that cost can be for naught if your software is pirated and distributed freely online without your permission. This is called software piracy, and preventing it has been a focus of the software industry since its commercial inception in the 1980s. A variety of methods have been employed, with varying degrees of success.
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Legal Protection
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The idea that an idea can be owned is relatively new. In 1474, the Republic of Venice was the first to codify a law protecting ideas, including inventions and books, from being stolen; most nations worldwide have since followed suit. It is this idea---that ideas can be owned, and the creator of an idea has the right to profit from it---that makes the commercial sale of software possible. This gives software manufacturers all over the world the right to sue those who steal their work. Unfortunately, having the right to sue doesn't mean it's practical to sue---millions of people pirate software every year, and individually prosecuting all of them isn't practical. Instead, many software companies take measures to deter people from pirating, making pirated software harder to find.
Early Protection
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In the early days of software piracy protections were fairly simple. Many games, for example, would ask you to type information found in the game's instruction manual to verify you in fact owned the game---a fairly effective measure before photo copiers became commonplace. Some floppy discs would include code that made it impossible to install a given piece of software more than once---leading to a variety of frustrations for those switching computers or whose computer breaks.
The advent of the Internet led to people sharing information on how to bypass such methods, leading to modern security methods.
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Serial Numbers
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A common security method in the CD-ROM age is to require all customers to enter a security key, or serial number, upon installing the software. Typically this number will be unique to you and entitles you to install the software on only one computer. A prominent example of this method is Microsoft, which uses it for its flagship Windows operating system as well as its Office suite of programs. Many other software companies use this system, usually with an online component that makes sure the program isn't installed on any other computers.
Calling Home
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Another way companies protect their software is to "call home" regularly---that is, the software will periodically connect to a network capable of confirming whether or not a given piece of software is legal. This method not only protects against software piracy during the installation process, but for the entire lifespan of the product in question. Frequently, security updates and patches will depend on these "calls home," giving users an incentive to not block the calls with their firewall.
Cat and Mouse
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Naturally, pirates have found their way around all these methods. Requirements for serial numbers can be removed by changing the software, and serial code generaters are very good at guessing what might work as a number. Any mechanism that calls home can be removed from the software given time. The result of pirates' increasing sophistication is an arms race of sorts, where software vendors try to lock down their software and pirates continue to crack new methods. The increasing cost of this arms race has caused some vendors to drop such protection outright, assuming people willing to go to such lengths to pirate a game probably wouldn't buy a copy anyway.
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