The first thing to understand about protecting applications from Piracy is that the real cost of this process is generally at the ‘back end’, in other words the costs of supporting and rolling out products including copy protection technologies far outweighs any initial investment in buying the tools to do it.

Many first time buyers consider the functionality and features along with price first without taking the time to consider the impact on their customers and also the internal issues with all those involved in the process from engineering, support to customer service and marketing – all these issues add ‘invisible’costs.

It is essential that all these costs are estimated and then weighed up against the benefits of implementing Copy Protection – in some cases they may exceed the benefits of the extra revenues from using protection.

Also, poor technologies and poor implementation of copy protection will yield lots of bad PR and additional unnecessary costs.

It is essential to strike the right balance between protecting your profits from thieves and casual copying and the inconvenience to your end users before you decide to use copy protection.

Get the balance wrong and you will lose a lot more than those extra profits.

So what do you need to consider?

First, what will be the response from your end users to having the restrictions of anti piracy technology?

There are many types of copy protection you could choose but the best will minimize any impact on end users – allowing them to control and move their licenses easily and without intervention from the developer.

This is also essential for you because this is the only way to limit the support costs you will be inundated with if you don’t.

When choosing the technology you also want to ensure that it is ‘reliable’ – this means that it will not prevent authorized users from using your products during the normal lifecycle of a PC – It must be able to keep working through Windows updates and re-formats for example. Or what about if the user upgrades the motherboard or LAN card. It must keep working quietly in the background or once again support costs will be high along with calls to the complaints dept.

This ability also has another very important benefit – it prevents the thieves that use the universal ‘loophole’ that they have re-formatted to call up and get a free license. A major issues with Windows and Office for example and only prevented by the Nalpeiron Licensing Service™.

There are also key issues like the ability to prevent users making a Ghost copy of the HDD and then calling for a refund, re-loading the Ghost image after having returned the disks. A favorite method for casual pirates.

Of course the technology has to achieve the basics of preventing casual copying and spreading software to friends, unless it is a demo mode version of course. Many anti piracy solutions are so weak that they don’t even achieve this.

Also, you need to make the process of getting a license fast and efficient in today’s ‘now’ World – this means offering multiple ways to get a license from full Internet Activation using a seamless service or one that allows those behind firewall’s and using proxy servers to get a license using a ‘self service’ but online system – this is essential as it will drive up costs dramatically if users have to call you for their licenses.

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