90% of Cracked and Pirated Software Uses "Homegrown" Digital Protection

If the software you publish has never been cracked, pirated or just plain stolen - you should consider yourself very lucky.

Vancouver, British Columbia (PRWEB) July 24, 2004 -- If the software you publish has never been cracked, pirated or just plain stolen - you should consider yourself very lucky.

SoftwareShield Technologies Inc. released research results today that examined how software publishers license and protect their titles. The survey sampled over two hundred North American software companies, revealing valuable information about these publishers.

"Past research focused primarily on the financial losses from piracy. However, our research focuses mainly on who is getting cracked and why. The results are shocking. We decided to release some of the more relevant findings so that software publishers might be better prepared in the future." says Zack Wickes, president of SoftwareShield Technologies Inc.

The study showed that a remarkably high number of publishers (88%) who distribute their products electronically have had cracks or pirated versions of their titles released on the Internet at one time.

Of these publishers, the vast majority (92%) relied on their own developers to build their software licensing and protection systems "in-house". Further, for these same respondents, almost three-quarters (71%) reported that licensing and protection systems were either the last functional requirement implemented, or were over the projects time budget and had to be rushed.

The results above largely confirmed what was already suspected. However, the next set of observations was particularly shocking and is potentially valuable information for software publishers looking to maximize profits.

In dramatic contrast to those who have been victims of piracy above, just over half of those publishers who had never experienced illegal cracks of their titles reported they used a third-party licensing or protection software development kit (SDK). More often than not, these publishers purchased the SDK in the first half of the product development cycle or it was already owned from previous projects or titles.

The other half of publishers who had lost nothing to cracks or pirated titles relied on a solution developed in-house. Interestingly however, only 5% of these companies reported leaving the licensing and protection "until the last minute".

Publishers should pay careful attention to two key conclusions from this research:

1. Using a good third party licensing and protection solution can reduce a publisher's probability of a crack appearing for their titles by up to 40%.

2. Leaving the design and implementation of in-house licensing solutions until the last minute or under-estimating the resources required always results in a less effective system. Even if you decide to build your own licensing and protection systems, do not leave it to the end of your project or under-estimate your requirements.

"The decision for most publishers is clear: To maximize profits, reduce costs and enhance security, publishers should buy a good software licensing SDK. Whether you purchase the SoftwareShield SDK or the competitions, the important thing is to buy a third-party solution, as early as possible in your development cycle - your project ultimately will be better off" says Wickes.

The SoftwareShield System SDK addresses this growing need from software publishers worldwide. Publishers use the SDK to electronically generate and enforce their software licenses and guard against unauthorized use by implementing a wide variety of built-in product activation algorithms or copy protection - all from a single binary file. Product activation can be completely automated and run securely behind a payment processing merchant or gateway - completely hands off.

The SoftwareShield System SDK ships electronically in three editions. Every edition ships with: the "License Manager" application to create and manage licenses, the "Manual-Activator(tm)" to unlock, activate and remote-control customers software, the "ClientProtector(tm)" component for integrating into client applications and the "FingerPrint Viewer(tm)" for inspecting and generating machine Fingerprints used in machine-locking. Additionally, the Internet Edition ships with the "Web-Activator(tm)" which allows vendors to integrate the SoftwareShield System SDK with their e-commerce solution to automatically generate Activation Codes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You can check out the SoftwareShield System SDK and download the free Trial Edition at http://www.softwareshield.com or contact the company directly at info@softwareshield.com. Prices for the base SDK range from $379.95 US to $899.00 US, depending on the edition and number of installations.

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