New to Copy Protection?

The TRUE cost of Software Copy Protection is "Back End"

Many software developers forget to realise that 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. Neither do they consider 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 even exceed the benefits of the extra revenues gained from using protection.

Avoid bad PR

This happens time and time again – using poor technologies and poor implementation of copy protection will always 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 – you will loose the respect of your customers.

So what do you need to consider?

• What will be the response from your End Users to having the restrictions of anti piracy technology?
• From the many types of copy protection, you should choose the one that will best minimize any impact on End Users – allowing them to control and move their licenses easily and without intervention from the developer.
• This is essential for you too because it 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. For example, it must be able to keep working through Windows updates and re-formats. An example would be 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 department.
• 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. This has been major issue with Windows and Office for example and can only be prevented by using PRO-Tector™.
• There are also key issues like the ability to prevent users making a Ghost copy of the HDD and then calling for a refund, and re-loading the Ghost image after having returned the disks. This is a favourite method for casual pirates – but PRO-Tector™ prevents this!
• 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.
• You also 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 firewalls 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.
• Another very effective method is to provide a ‘plug and play’ hardware solution that the user simply plugs into a USB port and the product works. This is very useful as it eliminates the need for a web connection or the call to customer services.