There is no such thing as software theft.

Exactly what I said phrased in a more pc manner, eh?

I have a laptop and a Mac. I run Parallels on the Mac, which runs WinXP (or Win9x, or Vista, or Linux, or...).

If I buy software and stick it on my Mac (Parallels), there is no "hardware ID" because I can change it on the fly. "Parallels, I want you to see a dual-core system. Now I want you to see a quad-core system. Now I want you to have a MAC address of [...]. Now I want to have a bridged ethernet connection."

If I get a virus on WinXP on Parallels, I blow it away and want to reinstall the software. I can't, if those protective measures are in place.

On my laptop, I run most all of my downloaded software through Sandboxie. I may play a demo game, or browse the internet, or whatever, and if it gets infected with some virus, I blow away that particular sandbox, rootkits, malware, and all.

Now my 1-hour demo game can be played for 1 hour, then my progress saved. I run the 1-hour demo again through a second sandbox, but this time, copy the saved progress data to the new sandbox and continue from my last-saved location at "time=0". I play for another hour. And so on, and so forth.

I have some computers that have no internet access. If I want to install the game on that computer, I'd either have to download it from internet-connected Computer 1, then copy it over to internet-disconnected Computer 2 and try to run it. (Maybe it's behind a very tight firewall or something.) What then?

Trying to prevent people from pirating is not going to work. If it's popular enough to buy, it's popular enough to crack. I would (either) release it as OSS (yay!), or release it closed with a promise to OSS it later, or release a basic game and charge for extra content.

If you look at previous attempts at DRM it has generally been unsuccessful, even by billion dollar corporations. Without a deep background in computer engineering, you're unlikely to develop something that an experienced hacker with a deep background in computer engineering will have trouble deciphering. It's really not even worth your time or effort at this point, IMO.

I would recommend you discuss this with a lawyer if you're serious about it. IIRC, you're only ~15-16 (though that has little to do with it), but more so you're asking here so you probably don't know much about it. College really helped to open my eyes to the liabilities that can be placed upon you by selling software and by software development in general. Having a good lawyer is definitely worth your time and money.

You should definitely talk to a lawyer about what kind of liabilities you'll have selling software and, if you decide to go that route, to help you write a software license. You may not realize the repercussions of selling software licenses. You may also want to formulate some kind of agreement between you and your lawyer holding them accountable for errors or omissions in the license agreement. The thing is, it can get very messy this way for everyone involved.

Open source has a lot of advantages that you should consider. And open source doesn't necessarily mean you don't get paid at all. For example, you can opt to charge for the source/binary (I wouldn't really recommend this though for anything less than professional software with a strong enough engine to build off of; the Source engine is a good example of where this is a good model).

Better yet, you can give the source/binary away for free and accept donations from your users. Some of the users that like the game will likely contribute to the maintenance of this and development of new games. Also, this way you will get backed by open source developers that support your project. They may contribute and/or point out problems that need fixing.

An added bonus is that an "as is" license is much more acceptable when the user isn't paying for the use of software (you can probably get away with it for proprietary software as well, but it doesn't say good things about you). The users that don't like it won't be sore about being taken by you because they won't have paid anything yet.

Personally, if you're just developing games for fun or as a hobby you should probably just take what you can get from open sourcing them and getting feedback from users. I don't know much about this either, but I've been pulled towards the open source side of the fence and I like where I'm at.

Oh, and BTW, even if you plan to open source your software, I STILL recommend you discuss it with a lawyer.

There's nothing preventing you from charging for GPL software. You only need to provide sources for free/the cost of delivering, upon request, and grant all rights to the recipient (so they could turn around and sell copies too, or give it away for free, if they wanted; basically what pirates already do).

But my whole thinking on trying to prevent software copyright infringement is this. Software piracy has been around since the beginning of time, and all attempts at preventing/stopping it have been futile at best. Yet, we still have companies making thousands to millions of dollars from software sales...

There are other open source licenses. And nothing is stopping you from writing your own (read: paying a lawyer to write your own).

Onewing is right, a lot of people in this thread are not answering the question. The gist of the question is 'what can I do to make it more difficult to steal my software'. Most of the replies seem to be saying 'don't bother'.

I like Dustin's response.

From my point of view, if the goal is to minimise the gains of piracy, then what you want is to maximise this: (cost of using a pirated copy of the software) - (cost of using the software legitimately) If you intend to charge money for your software, then "cost of using the software legitimately" can be no less than the price. It is true that most software protection can be cracked easily, so it is almost never be worth implementing software protection that makes life harder for legitimate users. (ie. software protection that raises the cost of using the software legitimately probably will not raise the cost of piracy enough to be worth it). Ideally, software protection should be invisible for the legitimate users, and a pain in the arse for the pirates. ... I just realised that I actually don't have a lot of constructive input to give. A lot of modern computer games have some very basic copy protection that gets cracked straight away, but must be recracked every time a patch is released. That's worth thinking about, I guess.

hmmm... perhaps I will just trust the users to be responsible. Thank you all for your help.

Because that's the right response.

To kind of answer a question the OP posted in a different thread, about the only thing I have no problems with is a registration system. You download the full program for free, and upon entering a registration code, all of the features are unlocked.

If people share the executable, the end user must type in somebody's registration code. That alone is enough to raise alarm bells in a honest person's head, because he'll realize that the program isn't free. If he still enters information that isn't his, you know he isn't honest and not likely to buy it anyway.

Also, nobody can distribute the full, working program unless they hack it, which not many people can do. If your program is so good that somebody hacked it and distributed it, then you're probably making a lot of sales.

It all comes back to making sure there is an audience for your program. If your audience is 18 to 24 year old college students, you are probably out of luck (if you don't have a large marketing budget). No protection scheme is going to force them to buy your software. You need to make something that people want for the price you put on it.

The honest vs. dishonest thing is not a binary quantity. I mean, there's a continuous spectrum of honesty. A person's decision to pirate/cheat/steal or whatever is based on a bunch of different things; including how "honest" the person is but also risk, difficulty, importance (for example, killing someone would be bad even if it were risk free and easy to do), obviousness (it may be easy to pirate the software, but if a person doesn't see how easy it is they may not try; or it might be really easy to rob your house, but as long as the potential criminals don't realise that then they are less likely to try), and so on.

For the kind of small time software piracy we are talking about, the risk and importance are always going to be pretty small. But it would probably be beneficial to put in whatever small tricks you can think of to increase the difficulty of cracking the software; and try not to make it obvious how to apply the crack on other computers. The basic scheme that Matthew just gave actually sounds pretty good to me; but if it is obvious that the same code can be used to unlock any number of copies, then people may find it easier to google for a code rather than pay for one. It would be better if the code were somehow dependant on who was activating it...

So you antagonize all the people who buy your game honestly?