At 02:26 AM 12/24/00 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>Getting around the license stuff will always be trivial, however, in
>spite of the pipe dreams of fools. If the software can be read by the
>user's computer, it can be copied. If it can be copied, automated
>tools will be developed to permit it.
>
>Fake "cryptography", hardware "keys", hardware modifications and all
>the other garbage people try are at best ways to slow down duplication
>and to annoy legitimate users. None of it works in the end. The sick
>thing is, all of it has been tried before, over and over, and yet new
>companies constantly appear promising new holy grails for the copy
>protection crowd.
I disagree that it is pointless, although I agree that copy/run protection
can always be subverted, because at some place the content is cleartext
in order to be used.
All locks are subvertable, but they're still useful e.g., on cars ---
to deter amateur (trivial) theft and to correct mistaken identities (two
identical cars near each other in a parking lot).
For esoteric software @ $100,000 per seat, and users with reasonable
assets, bypassable security is a practical reminder of the liability should
you get caught.
Of course, for say 3rd world companies who don't have that kind of
cash, and aren't worried about copyright law, reverse engineering
could be worth it -esp. since you're not spending a $100,000/yr engineer
on reverse engineering it.
And I'll argue that even if a perfectly cracked version of esoteric software
(some $100K/seat _Synopsys_ tool, say) were freely circulated, it would
not be used by the folks who pay for it now. _Photoshop_, yes, but that
would be pop software; and graphic arts shops still license it.
But for say consumer products -music, videos, pop software- the game
is over. As a senior engineer at a massive Japanese entertainment
company acknowledged to me, "they have logic analyzers in Hong Kong."
dh
