[comp.software-eng] Software Theft and Protection

moreaux@groucho (05/31/90)

I am in need of reference material and/or information 
concerning the area of software protection measures. My interest
is concentrated on the technical side, rather than the legal issues
or court cases. As part of my graduate work I am planning to 
devise some method of establishing ownership of code through 
the use of style, metrics, complexity, embedded code, etc as a
fingerprinting type of technique. If such a beast can be devised,
it will provide a springboard to legally defining code ownership.


Thank you.


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warren@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Warren Harrison) (05/31/90)

In article <1990May31.051526.17185@groucho> moreaux@groucho.UUCP () writes:
>
>As part of my graduate work I am planning to 
>devise some method of establishing ownership of code through 
>the use of style, metrics, complexity, embedded code, etc as a
>fingerprinting type of technique. If such a beast can be devised,
>it will provide a springboard to legally defining code ownership.

Software Science has been used for a first pass at plaguerism
detection for years now. Karl Ottenstein did some work on this
when he was at Purdue. I have heard of several schools that
also do this. The last I heard, Karl was at Los Alamos Labs.

In the Fall, a special issue of the Journal of SYstems and
Software will include a paper about a plagiarism detection
system. The author is Geoff Whale from a university in
Australia (anyone have his e-mail address?). If you're
really interested I'll see if I can dig up an address for
him.

Warren

==========================================================================
Warren Harrison                                          warren@cs.pdx.edu
Department of Computer Science                                503/725-3108
Portland State University