I've been watching this thread, and had to chime in after reading this
post. There's nothing wrong with a desire to protect your intellectual
property. But when you cross the line into programmatically digging into
someone's email address book, or "phoning home" without the user's
consent, you as the programmer open yourself up to legal liability and a
complete alienation of your user base.
These underhanded techniques can usually be detected, and when they are
it makes people very, very angry. There was a Mac app recently (shall
remain nameless) that deleted the user's home directory if it thought it
was pirated. That "copy protection scheme" lasted all of about 3 hours,
until it was revealed and posted all over mac forums and websites. That
type of negative PR could kill a decent software product.
In the software world, the programmers have to extend a certain level of
trust to their users, and the users in turn expect the programmer to be
worthy of their trust, that their app isn't going to do anything devious
on their system.
Just my two cents, hope I'm not ranting :-)
Joel
GAmoore at aol dot com wrote:
Just asking theoreticaly .... Is there a way, to grab their user name from
the computer (maybe Apple's address book for the owner or Entourage), then email
that surreptiously back to "Developer's Headquarters" so you would see who is
using your software and how often? If a company or school uses illegal
software, I heard that there can be huge fines/damages lawsuits like $100,000. The
previous sys admin at my college used to threaten to turn in anyone and he
would make enough money to retire on.
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