Then he doesn’t need to patch your program, he just supplies this keygen to the warez community and everyone can help themselves to your program. When the cracker uncovers the logic of your unlock keys, he can create a program to generate such keys which look and behave exactly like the legitimate ones you sell to your customers. Then they can create a ‘patch’ or modification to your executable that bypasses the protection.Īn even worse type of compromise is a keygen. Very few vendors supply source code, but people in the know can read off your licensing logic like an open book using specialized reverse engineering tools (softICE, IDA and other debuggers and disassemblers). Imagine you shipped your source code along with your program, then it would be trivial for even amateur crackers to bypass your protection and run the program without paying. Many ISVs write their own licensing code, while others rely on off-the-shelf protection and licensing products (Armadillo, WinLicense etc). In all cases some sort of unlocking takes place using a plain key, or a license file, or online activation, or some combination thereof. Imagine if this 70% didn’t exist or it was converted to regular paying customers! How is it done?ĭownloadable software falls into 2 categories: those that run in trial mode until you buy a key to unlock the full functionality and those that are special downloads for customers that pay the registration fee. I estimate over 70% of the regular users use one of the known keygens. I track how many people install the program every day and also I have a good guesstimate for the number of people using cracked versions of xplorer². Piracy statistics from Business Software Alliance report 2009 (click image to enlarge). If you search for warez or torrents you will find the software you want for free, either the latest or an older working version. I bet that all these programs are cracked in one way or another - at least those popular enough for crackers to care about them. Many are created by very small to medium sized companies - many even run by a single programmer/webmaster/marketer/entrepreneur. There are over 200,000 programs listed on and that’s just for Windows. I have been a microISV for over 10 years so lets forget about the entertainment industry and concentrate on my field, software. So if you discover your software illegally distributed in some warez website, you can send a so called “DMCA section 512 takedown notice” to the website host and they are expected to remove that particular file from circulation - or risk the wrath of the law. This law is very broad, and not without controversy, but it works – closing down websites that distribute illegal content and removing copyright infringing downloads from file-hosting websites with summary procedures, among other things. A little bit like the war on terror, isn’t it?Ī different line of defense for ailing copyright owners is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a US law with global reach for copyright protection (the european EUCD equivalent is not as broadly known). To add insult to injury legitimate customers are usually hurt by such reinforced software protection and activation systems. But usually crackers have no problem circumventing any protection system that we can dream up. Software authors and music enterprises are fighting back by tightening the DRM (Digital Rights Management) of their products in a futile effort to stop online piracy. Downloading the latest movie or windows software from somehow doesn’t strike them as theft - it’s not like stealing a loaf of bread! The traditional music industry is already down on its knees as a result, and software may be the next to follow. People around the world seem to have very lax morals when it comes to abusing digital content. Why buy something when you can download it ‘for free’? Billions of dollars are lost every year from illegal downloads of music, movies and software. He kindly agreed to write this post about software piracy, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and his CrackTracker product. So when I heard that fellow microISV owner Nikos Bozinis had created a tool to help software vendors fight piracy, I asked him to write a guest post. Software piracy is a real issue for every software company, large and small, and it isn’t going away any time soon.
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