Macromedia's New Product Activation/Pirating Software

Macromedia announced their new product activation initiative. It makes me wonder how much money they spent coming up w/this method to try to bypass people pirating their software.

While this method will certainly curtail those buddies who simply share their serial numbers with friends, I don't think it'll make much of an impact on the overall scale. People who a content w/stealing software are always going to find ways to break product activation procedures. The problem with implementing any kind of copy protection, is that the copy protection itself always ends up having to be implementing in the software itself—which means somebody with a memory monitoring and little bit of knowledge can hack the executable to bypass the copy protection—or in this case can simply figure out the registration algorithm and implement a key generator for calculate validate keys to use in the telephone registration.

If you use a commercial software package and rely on it to do work, you should pay for it. The only way a company can stay in business is to make money and the way a software company makes money is by selling it's product. While I think you need some level of protection in there—to bypass the casual user sharing serial numbers—I also think it's a waste of money R&D money to spend a bunch of time trying to come up with new ways to thwart pirates from stealing your software. If there's a will, there's a way...