Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: Copy Protection

Posted by Eian on 1999-06-30

There a ton of schemes that are used to perform just the operation 
that you have described. One of the most popular, and perhaps 
easiest is that you require some sort of "key" for the software to 
work. Hopefully, the key is derived from some sort of information 
that would make it unique to each computer. The only problem 
about this is that then you would have to generate a key for each 
and every copy that you sold. 

Another approach (I think that Nintendo did this, or perhaps Sony) 
was to actually put bad blocks (not necesarrly bad, just messed up 
in a certain way) in your media. Then, on load, your program 
makes sure that these "funky" blocks are present. Of course, this 
would best be implemented using a CD-ROM. Actually, even for a 
short time this fooled even the people with the CD burners, as the 
blocks were messed up in someway that (I don't know how) the 
burners didn't catch it.

Hope this helps,

Eian

On 30 Jun 99, at 14:24, bbs wrote:

> 
> Hi
> If I want to sell a software per copy. how can i protect this ?
> let say i'm using 1.44 diskette media or cd rom,
> Is there any copy protection software out there that secure enough that i
> can use ? Thanks !
> 
> 
> >