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How Can Software be Protected from Piracy ?

posted by janrinok on Friday March 21 2014, @10:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the questions-without-answers dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Echoing a question asked on programmers.stackexchange.com - How can software be protected from piracy ?

It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy than a "serial number/activation key." I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. Can there exist a fool-proof and hack-proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, could it be theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, can hackers always find a way around it ?"

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kristian on Friday March 21 2014, @11:29PM

    by kristian (2395) on Friday March 21 2014, @11:29PM (#19591) Homepage

    Piracy is difficult to prevent and hasn't even been shown to be a net bad. Piracy can be great for publicity and can boost sales. Microsoft knows this. They turned blind eye to Windows piracy in China because they knew that if they didn't they would lose the market.

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 23 2014, @12:27AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday March 23 2014, @12:27AM (#19884) Homepage

    Back in the olden days, WordPerfect Corp's support was extended even to pirated copies. The goodwill that generated sold a lot of upgrades. In my observation, WP's market decline wasn't initiated by the Windows/Word thing, but rather by a shift of policy to only supporting proven-paid customers... which kinda killed that previously-healthy "chomping at the bit to buy an upgrade" market generated by pirated copies.