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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: 5, Insightful) by TheLink on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:11AM

    by TheLink (332) on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:11AM (#19602)

    Sure: Software as a Service or similar.

    People are still paying Blizzard for WoW. You can hack the client and play it on your own servers if you want, but it ain't gonna be the same thing ;).

    Works as long as you can put some/most of the stuff that the users need/want on hardware that you control. The more of the stuff is on hardware you control the harder for someone to create a substitute for it.

    If the user's machine is a mere "terminal" and you control the "mainframe", it's not so easy for the user to pirate your software.

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  • (Score: 1) by SuperCharlie on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:24PM

    by SuperCharlie (2939) on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:24PM (#19734)

    This was also my first thought. It is also one of the things I would never buy since even the mighty Google has good/great SaaS they regularly kill. The downside for this is it has to be sold as a subscription as you have ongoing server costs or priced with an EOL in mind which would throw in major costs upfront. In the scheme of things this is the only way to do it imho, and it still stinks :)