Lord Lucifer, you are probably correct. :D

Yep, even my lowly (and marginally profittable) plugins for Cinema 4D have been cracked and are available at your local Warez site for download.  I researched various methods of anti-piracy and read a ton of related articles. In the end, one has to balance reality with users - and I went with a publicly available encryption method (as a bare minimum 'keep 'em honest' approach).  What I mean (and what M$ seems to have never had) is that one should consider how the implementation of anti-piracy affects development, time, costs, resources, and, most assuredly, users!

The best noted anti-piracy is 'dial home' tech (requiring that there is an internet connection for the user to continuously verifiy their registration/licensing when the software is launched and sometimes during the course of its running).  Even that, as admitted by many others, is not even a partial deterrent.  Software companies have gone bankrupt and extinct from the pursuit of, well, not going bankrupt and extinct by the very virtue of investing more resources in anti-piracy than actual product development!

In the end, I do what is minimally annoying to my users (entering a serial number) so that they are not the benefactors of any insanity in futile attempts to thwart pirates.  If enough people appreciate my work, it will continue without Draconian measures.  If not, I will move onto something else.  There are usually enough people who respect your work to support your work despite those who provide less savory alternatives.  M$ hasn't figured that out (and thus the reason for the '$' in their name - it's all about the cash-flow, baby).

Robert

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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