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Who cares about the Software Piracy problem anyway?
By Jon Gillespie-Brown | March 5, 2007
You will know it takes a huge amount of work to develop your software and what a great feeling it is to see your creativity in use. However, while some developers get a kick out of simply seeing their software being used most of us would like some financial recognition for our work.
Many developers prefer to avoid the ‘piracy’ problem or think it won’t happen to them, but the reality of the situation is that the problem is extremely large and it affects even the smallest software developers.
If you doubt the scale of software piracy, the experience of a customer of Nalpeiron gives a very clear example. The customer had sold 7,000 copies of its software, but had 40,000 downloads of the upgrade! In other words, for every copy sold legitimately, a further five illegal copies were in use.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), says around 40 percent of all software in use is pirated, and that’s a pretty annoying if it’s your IP that being stolen – 40% of the value could be coming to your bottom line. It’s not just that someone is stealing your potential income; it’s also the fact that your ideas and all that work that went into designing and testing your application is being taken abused without your control.
I don’t want to make my end users angry
You need some way to protect the intellectual property rights of your software but you don’t want to make life too painful for your end users. Anyone who’s cursed licenses that don’t allow us to use software we’ve legitimately licensed, or struggled to find a hardware dongle or move licenses between PCs, will know how annoying copy protection can be.
What we all need is a technology that lets us license software in a way that end users find straightforward and non-irritating. Protection that lets them use the software freely while stopping them from copying it and passing it on, or installing it on multiple machines without buying more licenses.
We’re all looking for a system that is easy for both the developer and the end user to use, while still protecting all the hard work that went into developing the software in the first place.
Nalpeiron’s aim is to strike the right balance between protecting the application and enhancing the end user experience. The company finds that many software developers shy away from using copy protection because they believe it will irritate their honest customer base, and that they won’t actually get that many extra sales from people who would otherwise pirate the software.
It’s just too much hassle and cost to protect my applications
What we need is a simple to buy and simply to deploy system that doesn’t cost the earth. One that doesn’t need lots of maintenance and capital cost would be great too. A hosted model meets these needs at a low cost and without the hassles of “rolling your own” protection.
Nalpeiron’s product for software protection is the ‘Hosted’ Nalpeiron Licensing Service (NLS) with pricing from $799. This combines an Activation and Registration Service with a strong SDK. The SDK is used to copy protect your software while the server element takes care of all the stages of a user licensing your software, from trial management through to marketing. To get started all you need is to setup a product in the system, choose the number of license keys you need and integrate to your application with free sample projects – with a ‘simple’ integration you can be up and running in an afternoon.
One attraction of the Activation and Registration Service is that it is automated and managed for you, so freeing you from the need to devote expensive resources to handling the licensing side. This has many benefits and reduces the overhead on skilled staff spending time issuing authorization keys and sorting out licensing. You also get the ability to manage everything in one place with a total end user license history including which machines they are licensed on and when they activated.
You use the Hosted Licensing Service to manage the licensing – generating encrypted keys plus tracking, managing, revoking and reporting on the licenses along with preventing license infractions.
Why use a professional system as opposed to a “wrapper”?
The SDK is a secure API-based copy protection system (not a wrapper) that lets you include copy protection code in your software so that each installation is uniquely associated with the customer’s particular computer. There is no generic ‘crack’ on the web to unwrap every application; your protection is unique to you. The system doesn’t rely on entries in the system registry or on a ‘fingerprint’ file as Nalpeiron believes such techniques are easy to break.
The SDK uses an encrypted license key that is required in order to run the application on a particular machine. On the customer’s machine the copy protection mechanism stores a copy of the license key in a secure area on the hard disk. The communication between the application and the DLL is encrypted to prevent users intercepting the traffic and passing back a fake validation, and there are a range of other ‘anti-tampering’ features. It is a total end-to-end encrypted solution.
We need to ship to multiple platforms like Mac and Windows
The SDK is built for Visual Studio 2008 and is platform agnostic, working on Windows and Mac platforms (with Linux coming soon). Of course it’s compatible with most of the languages you’re likely to be using, including Visual Basic, Visual C++ and C#, Borland C++, Delphi and XCode. The SDK is simple to deploy works with all types of installation tools like Installshield and is even integrated into Wise Installation Studio.
We want a light touch; we don’t just want to “shut off” our customers
There’s nothing more annoying to customers than just being locked out of their software so the Nalpeiron Licensing Service uses an automated ‘Overdraft’ facility to handle any “over use”. If someone within an organization exceeds the license limit, the license code and the associated registered user details are flagged along with the details necessary to enable customer service staff to contact the user of the code to find out more. You then have the choice of either allowing the use to continue, or to ask for more license fees!
I need the licensing to work with all my other systems like CRM and E-commerce
The Nalpeiron Licensing Service exposes a full range of secure software and web services API’s so it can be controlled by your systems. In addition, it can securely deliver licenses to your e-commerce providers. Integration with Salesforce.com and Visual Studio make life even easier.
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Topics: Software Licensing |
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