The introduction of the acronym "DRM" has drawn all the hysteria it
always does.
The description you've posted much more closely matches license (or
sometimse entitlement) management software than DRM. There are many
companies active in this field. Many are small, but Microsoft sells
some solution and there are moderately large companies around. Some
of these have been around for many years.
Traditionally, license management software looked at local files or
databases rather than out on the Internet. However, I'm sure Internet
options exist.
The better software of this sort is challenging to crack. Certainly,
none of it is *impossible* to crack - though the best dongle-based
systems are probably extremely difficult (but also unacceptable for
most kinds of software).
For the most part, software like this aims to keep reasonably honest
people honest. Yes, they can probably hire someone to hack around the
licensing software. (There's generally not much motivation for J
Random User to break this stuff, since it protects business software
with a specialized audience.) But is it (a) worth the cost; (b) worth
the risk - if you get caught, there's clear evidence that you broke
things deliberately.
Probably the greatest use for such software is not in preventing
unlicensed users from running it at all but in enforcing contractual
limits - e.g., you can only use this to manage up to X machines.
Every company that has sold software with that kind of contract will
likely find that, unless the software enforces the limitation, its
customers will exceed it - often unknowingly, often by large factors.
I'd suggest that you, and the company you're consulting to, spend some
time understanding the market. What kind of software vendors are you
selling to? B2B is a very different marketplace from consumer.
Within B2B, "high touch" sales are very different from mass market.
If you go international, a great deal depends on where you think
you're going to sell. If you are ultimately depending on contractual
enforcement, with the licensing software just an encouragement to good
behavior, you're fine in the US and Western Europe, but you're not
going to have a happy time in, say, Russia and China.
A Google search on "license management software" turns up many hits,
including an overview article that may be useful: http://software.forbes.com/license-management-software
(One thing to be aware of is that this phrase is a bit ambiguous,
covering both software a vendor puts in to its code to manage
licenses, and software sold to large end users to help them keep track
of what licenses they are using. The listing in the article covers
both, but is still incomplete - it misses one of the long-established
companies, Acresso Software - a new name - that sells the FLEXnet
license enforcement software, a business it's been in for at least 10
years or so.)
-- Jerry
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