According to Business Software Alliance, Software Piracy is the unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted software. This can be done by copying, downloading, sharing, selling, or installing multiple copies onto personal or work computers.
Whether you are casually making a few copies for friends, loaning disks, distributing or downloading pirated software from the Internet, or buying a single software program and then installing it on multiple computers (including personal), you are committing copyright infringement—
How well is your software protected?
Software Proctection is a term that is well known in software developers where they strive themselve to have better and better protection each time to protect their software been pirated and for illegal usage. So, most of the software nowadays are protected somehow in a software based license protection or a hardware based licensed protection.
Software based and Hardware based Software Protection
Software based Software License Protection is the earliest protection method available and usually the protected application will require user to key in Serial No., License Key or Unlock Code to activate the software license. Most of the third party Software License Protection provider will provide a ready made encryption engine of which software developers can use this to encrypt their software applications as to add the protection layer onto their software applications. Usually, the protection will tie with some unique ID from the computer system such as Hard Disk ID or Network Card ID. Also due to this reason, usually if there is any hardware problem such as Hard Disk or Network Card spoilt, license re-activation will be needed. It will also means the Software Developers will need to keep track and verify the License Key reissue request from the end users, of which some end users might try to take advantage on it. As Software based Protection do not come with any additional devices, it will have to store all the licensing information into the computer system and mostly hide it inside registry.
Hardware based Software License Protection is now the most popular protection method where the end user will require to plug in the valid hardware device to the computer in order to run the application. Third party provider will sell the devices which is commonly called Dongles together with software SDK for software developers to do the integration. Usually for Hardware based Software License Protection, end user will not require to key in any Serial No., License Key nor Unlock Code, just plug in the Dongle and run the application, the protection will authenticate the license through Dongle. There are many different forms of Dongles available in the market and the most advanced Dongles are now built based on MCU Smart Card of which it is able to provide very maximum protection and thus make hacking almost impossible. As now, software developers are able to determine your software licenses with their Dongles thus make software distribution much easier and more secure.
Both Software and Hardware Based Protection have their own Pros and Cons. Different software developers might have different preferences on selecting either Software based or Hardware based Software License Protection into their software applications.
Hardware Based Software Protection is no more Costly!
SecureMetric Technology introducing its hardware based protection dongle into the market at impressive competitive pricing. Any software Developers who are interested on hardware based software protection are welcomed to try on SecureDongle X & SecureDongle Software Development Kit and you will be stunned by its fantastic features at its impressive pricing!
Visit http://www.securemetric.com to know more about SecureDongle X and detailed about software licensing protection.
