On Sep 28, 2004, at 4:31 PM, Joel Clermont wrote:
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.
I agree with the digging into someone's email box. In no way should
any software compromise the privacy and security of the user, even for
good intentions.
While phoning home can be frowned upon by *some* users, it is a very
common technique in modern software. It can even be appreciated by the
users if it also provides a useful service, like checking for updates.
While I said that I *could* also have the software pass serial number
information, I also said that only excessive violations would be
flagged as possible pirated copies.
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.
Very wrong.
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.
My biggest worry is really not the license code sharers, but rather
those few users who are devious enough to write Key Generators. I do
not have any good ideas on how to effectively combat this type of
attack except to keep the available license code pool very small (1000
to start and add more to future installers as the need arises).
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