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Copy Protecting WinBatch Applications


Question:

Has anyone successfuly copy-protected a distribution of a WinBatch application (either wbt or compiled version)? If so, what technology did you use? What were your criteria for selecting it?

Answer:

I can't see how you could copy-protect an uncompiled source file such as a .WBT file.

As far as compiled scripts go, any sufficiently determined hacker will defeat your copy-protection.

A couple of questions must be asked when you are considering implementing any sort of copy-protection:

  1. Will the cost of the copy-protection technology become a signficant portion of the cost of my software product that I'm selling?

  2. Will the implementation of the copy-protection alienate my customers to the point where they will choose an alternative software product?
If you answer "yes" to either or both of those questions then it is probably not worth implementing.

As for methods of copy-protecting, are you looking to run an application from CD/DVD media only where the copy protection is on the disc itself, or are you more interested in some sort of license key type of protection? Also, live product-activation or use of a hardware dongle comes to mind, too, but again these methods have their own sets of problems that they introduce when used.

In the past, I've protected one compiled WinBatch script using a product registration key that was derived from an MD5 hash involving several pieces of information, some of which were public, some of which were provided by the customer and some of which were private & used internally in the script itself. The purpose was to enforce licensing terms for the software itself. The public information and the license-terms portion of the registration as well as the final MD5 hash of the information were all stored in a single text file used by the script at run-time to validate the user's license.


Article ID:   W16453
File Created: 2005:02:18:12:20:50
Last Updated: 2005:02:18:12:20:50