wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) (08/05/87)
I agree completely. Dongles are quite offensive. Life here in a little university is a bit different from the commercial world where we're talking about business oriented programs that sell thousands or even millions of copies. With things like Word Perfect, Dbase III or something like that, the vendor can build the price of piracy into the product and amortize it off over a large customer base-- basically the way grocery stores increase the price of legitimately purchased goods to cover shoplifting expenses. Unfortunately we have to deal with programs here where the author sells 10 or 20 copies a year. They have to ask up to $5000 for their work to be able to feed themselves. Needless to say, these guys are a lot more worried about piracy. We've have to put up with a lot of very noxious copy-proofing methods. Dongles are particularly annoying. Recently we had an instance where we bought a package from a guy that was marketing his work through Bioquant. His program was pretty buggy, and a discussion with the author revealed that a bit of manual patching with "DEBUG" on a PC was necessary. I trotted over to the machine and loaded the file to make the changes. When loaded, it was gibberish. Lo and behold, there was a dongle in the serial port. Apparently, Bioquant was worried, and THEY had dongle-ized the software. This case was more annoying than usual since the program was designed to interface to laboratory equipment that is not easy to obtain outside of the program's marketer. Here, the specialized ancillary electronics would have been effective protection due to their proprietary nature. It's been my experience that good customer support is the best way to cease unauthorized use. Well, sort of. If the software is good enough, it shouldn't need customer support... What I did a while back when I had more free time and was selling my software was to give the users a new "password" each time they called in for assistance. That way, if they gave the program and password away to someone who was not a close associate, the password would get out of sync when the pirate called for help. If I suspected foul play, I'd tell the user I'd call back, thus getting a chance to check the phone number against the registration I had on file. I never had any complaints from irate users with my "system". I know the stuff I sold was pretty heavily pirated, but I just jacked up the price to compensate. So what, I rationalized off the increased price by the fact that the purcahsers were giving the stuff away, and thus were appropriately "punished". The people that lost out were the legitimate users. Oh well, they just should have pirated it I guess! I also gave out a lot of free updates. Bill (wtm@neoucom.UUCP)
jones@uv4.eglin.af.mil (Calvin Jones, III) (05/08/90)
Karl Lehenbauer <karl@sugar.hackercorp.com> writes: > At least with a dongle, it should be true that the copy protection is > encapsulated within the dongle (i.e. no filesystem foolaround, or > type-in-the- word), and the program loads when the dongle is present > without further adieu, and the disk themselves are unprotected, so you > can freely make backup copies. Obviously you don't have a teenager in the house that "needs" that second joystick port in a *HURRY* for the latest shoot'em up! Not much chance that the dongle will get replaced in the port when he's done. The fact is that dongles are too damn small and likely to get lost. There's also the problem of which dongle goes with which program. You get upwards of 3 or four and it gets hard to tell them apart!