• Wrappers are cheap
• Wrappers are easy to deploy
• You don’t need access to the source code

Let’s look at ease of deployment first.

Evolved from loader based mechanisms wrappers are designed to integrate easily into any software product – promising minimum hassle for the developer.

But not surprisingly, a copy protection system which is so easy to deploy is also easy to undermine.  Once “cracked” a wrapper can be countered with an “un-wrapper” which is also very easy to distribute and deploy.

Now turning to the cost issue.  Because wrappers are cheap, they don’t tend to be “feature rich” and though you, the developer may be prepared to cope with a certain amount of hassle and “work-arounds” in order to save money, your customer may not feel the same.

The first issue to consider is that wrappers don’t generally come with any mechanisms for tracking who has what license codes.  Issuing of codes needs to be manually tracked, and this can lead to human error.  One developer tells us:

“We are losing track of who has what codes and have to keep issuing codes before finding one that works”.

License codes can also be lost or disabled when a machine is reformatted, when the clock stops or when hardware changes are made.

Not only will these issues be costly and time consuming for you, but more importantly they can have a major negative impact on your customers experience of your software.

Wrappers then, may offer a suitable copy protection solutions for the hobbyist developer, but for the ISV with ambitions for long term business growth they are likely to represent a false economy: flimsy copy protection, high support costs and poor customer experience may quickly out-weigh any initial savings in time and money.

The ISV with long term plans needs to take the long view when selecting a copy protection solution.

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Resilience

There are few experiences which will annoy your customer more than finding themselves locked out of software which they have legitimately purchased.  Make sure the licensing solution you deploy does not fail when you end user upgrades their hardware.  Ensure your licensing solution will survive Windows upgrades, disk reformats and registry changes.

End-user installation experience

How will your end user feel if, having purchased your software, they are unable to activate it? You need to choose a software licensing solution that offers an easy and robust method of end user activation.  Better still, look for a solution that offers a choice of activation methods: internet, web based, phone and email methods

Ease of deployment

In today’s software industry time to market is critical.  You don’t want to find yourself adding days or weeks to your development timeline to allow for deployment and integration of your copy protection solution.  Before you buy find out just how easy the licensing solution is to deploy, and how much development time will be required for integration.

Portability

How important is it is portability for your end users?  In some parts of the software market this is now a critical issue.  Does your intended licensing solution make it easy for you customer to move between PCs using USB drives or web-based license storage, move licenses using a LAN Server and your Intranet Mapped Drives, move licenses using Portable Hard Drives and Zip type Drives, move and return licenses to a hosted activation server or PCs without using any media, with a single click? In choosing your software licensing solution it is going to be crucial that you understand how important these options are to your customer base.

Ease of License Control

How easy does your proposed licensing system make it for your to control end user installations of your software.  Does the solution offer “Proof of Removal” tools to verify the validity of refund requests?

Concurrent Licensing

End users are demanding more flexibility in licensing options.  The concurrent user model is extremely popular now.  Does your chosen software licensing management solution support this licensing model?  Does it facilitate work on PCs that have been locked down by the administrator?

Feature Controls

Does you intended software licensing system allow you to manipulate individual code modules, switching features on and off so that you can offer different “versions” of your product – say “basic”, “standard” and “premium”, each with different feature sets,  using the same code?

Comprehensive platform support

What versions of windows do your customers use?  Are all of your customers Windows users, or to some of them use Macs? Your chosen copy protection software should support all Windows versions, Mac and a wide range of development platform support.

Pricing

Many software licensing solutions providers price their services on a “royalty” model.  This means that you will be charged a % of your annual turnover for software licensing services.  Whilst this might seem like an attractive option when you are a small business with low turnover, think about how this pricing model will impact on your business as it grows. Royalty-free licensing enables you to maintain the same copy protection tools as your software becomes more successful without incurring financial penalties.

Guarantee

If your chosen software licensing provider doesn’t offer a no quibble money back guarantee perhaps you need to ask yourself why? Don’t be caught out by software that doesn’t deliver on its promises. Get a money-back guarantee to show you how confident your vendor is in its software, and to reduce your financial risk.

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3. What is a Software License?

A Software License is a contract of agreement between a software publisher and an end user of the licensed application. The Software License tends to be regulated by a document known as an End User License Agreement, or EULA. Though software licensing can be put in place via a paper agreement, it is most often embedded in the software itself as part of the installation process, or included as part of electronic product documentation.

For consumer software the software license agreement will usually be a standard document, which all purchasers must agree to before gaining access to the software. Enterprise software and other software provided to large corporates on the other hand is often governed by a bespoke software licensing agreement which can be the result of lengthy negotiations between the vendor’s and purchaser’s lawyers and may require considerable expertise to manage.

It is also important to understand that software vendors sell licenses for use of their software, they do not sell the software itself. So the software license agreement defines the “rights” that the user gets when they pay for said license.

The software licensing agreement will protect the authors copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) by defining the rights of the end user in relation to the usage of the application. For example:copying or duplication of the software for purposes other than backup is likely to fall outside the terms of most software license agreements, as is installation on more than one computer.

Because the end user has purchased a license to use the software editing the code, or changing the program in any way is also usually forbidden under the terms of the software license agreement. Software licenses might also restrict reverse engineering and bypassing controls intended to cut down on pirating, technology for achieving this is usually referred to as “copy protection software”. The exception to many of these controls is “open source software” whose use is generally unrestricted.

Most End User License Agreements also include liability limitation clauses designed to protect the publisher in the case of any unforeseen circumstances that might arise, or damage which might be caused as a consequence of using the software. This could be anything from a computer crash to loss of data, time or income.

Due to the nature of software it is also common for EULA’s to contain little or no warranty as to the suitability or performance of the product. For software publishers getting the EULA right can be critical to business success.

Careful consideration needs to be given to ensuring retention of intellectual property and thus retaining the ability to generate revenue from it. It is also important that you protect yourself from the various legal issues that may arise from selling software.

As an end user you need to be aware of what type of license you need and ensure that your use of software does not abuse the basis of the license you hold in order to avoid accusations of “software piracy”.

You will find a wide range of information on Software Licensing and copy protection within the knowledge base.

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This tends to be regulated via a document called the End User License Agreement, or EULA. Though software licensing can be a paper agreement, it is most often imbedded in the software itself as part of the installation process. In larger corporations much more complex agreements tend to be in place that require considerable legal expertise to manage and negotiate.

As software is "licensed" and not sold to the users an agreement is required to define the "rights" that the user gets when they pay for said license. A software licensing agreement protects the authors copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) by placing restrictions on the end user in relation to the usage of the application. For example: duplication for purposes other than backup, installation on more than one computer, editing the code, or changing the program in any way is usually forbidden unless the product is "open source". Software licenses might also restrict reverse engineering and bypassing controls intended to cut down on pirating, technology for achieving this is usually referred to as "copy protection software".

Most EULAs also include statements to protect the publisher in the case of any unforeseen circumstances that might arise as a consequence of using the software. This could refer to anything from a computer crash to loss of data, time or income. In addition, generally due to the nature of software no or a limited warranty is given to the suitability or performance of the software.

In general if you are a software publisher it is critical that you "license" your software to the recipient very carefully in order to retain your IPR and the ability to generate revenues from your work. It is also important that you protect yourself from the various legal issues that arise from selling software.

If you are a user you need to be sure what type of license you need and be careful not to abuse the basis  of the license or you could be accused of "software piracy".

Publishers who wish to enforce their software license tend to use other software applications to help them control their IP and these tend to be referred to as "software license management" technologies.

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There are many different types of copy protection working at many different levels. Companies wanting to protect their source code and binaries have a confusing array of options. Part of the reason for this involves the way that the copy protection industry developed. Various techniques evolved over time, often in parallel with each other:

Manual protection—literally!

Copy protection evolved to help software vendors combat an enemy—the software pirate. Because the war against piracy is fought on a virtual battleground, the rules of engagement change frequently as the weapons evolve. In the early days, for example, the weapons used against software pirates were often analogue.

Software publishers would ask questions about the text of the manual accompanying the program, meaning that unless a user had the manual, the software would be impossible to use. Pirates soon got around that problem by photocopying the manuals, until photocopier- proof manuals came along, at which point they had to either become more devious or less lazy, re-keying the manual by hand.

Encoding code: making software secret

Software vendors became more devious, encrypting their code to make it impossible for crackers to disassemble the binary files. This stopped crackers for a short time, but not for very long—they soon realized that although the source files were encrypted on disk, they could not be encrypted in memory because of the performance overhead involved in decrypting code during execution. Software vendors were using loader programs to take the encrypted disk-based file and load it into memory, decrypting it in the process. Once the program was in memory, it was unprotected and therefore vulnerable to the conventional analysis that enabled crackers to strip the copy protection from the source code.

Debuggers proved to be an invaluable tool for the pirates and led to the continuing rise in cracker clubs and the emergence of the warez community, which distributed cracked programs online. While many pirates sold bootleg software for commercial benefit, others cracked and distributed the code as a hobby, enjoying the status associated with being the first to break a particular program’s copy protection.

Riding the loader

The discovery that pirates continued to thwart copy protection mechanisms led to yet another stage of development, as software vendors began introducing loaders that sucked parts of the encrypted program into memory separately, on an as-needed basis. This made it difficult for crackers to analyze the source code using a debugger, because it was never all in memory at the same time. It was difficult, but not impossible. Innovative crackers learned to simply run the program repeatedly through all of its configurations, examining the decrypted segments
as they appeared until the whole binary had passed through the RAM, in a technique known as ‘riding the loader’.

The dongle

Using accompanying text to verify the authenticity of the software was only ever going to be a short term solution. Instead, software vendors took the battle to a more sophisticated level. One popular method in the early days was hardware protection, using the dongle.

This was a plug-in device that would connect to one of the machine’s interface ports. The software would check for the presence of the device before it would run. While effective, dongles were expensive to produce, and so cheaper systems had to be devised.

Today is very different, with a number of options to choose from including the Dongle, Wrapper software and Software Developer’s Kits.

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