Software is the life blood of many companies that produce it. Software piracy from large scale to small scale hurts these companies everyday. Software piracy is anything that includes illegally sharing a copy of software. This could be done by exchanging a disk with a friend, or by mass distributing illegal copies all over the world. The solution to software piracy is not going to be easy. Although it is impossible to prevent every method of software piracy, software publishers can at least discourage it and make it more difficult. Some of the more traditional anti-piracy schemes have involved the following: intentional physical defects at certain locations on an installation disk (with floppy disk software, but not with compact discs), registration codes that can only b

Some new and much less tedious copyright protection methods have been developed more recently for use with optical discs. For the most part, optical discs include the widely known CD-ROM and the newer Digital Versatile Disc, or DVD. The DVD similar to a CD-ROM, only it is capable of storing more data than the combined capacity of twenty-five CD-ROMs. In any case, some programs require the CD-ROM or DVD to be in the drive in order for the software to start up. This somewhat protects against installing multiple copies of software on multiple machines, but does not take into consideration the illegal replication factories that can be held accountable for most of the software piracy. On the other hand, the "DiscGuard" technology from an Israeli company known as TTR etches a special signature, or "fingerprint" into the pits and lands of optical discs such as CD-ROMs and DVDs. Levin says that this signature can be read for authenticity verification, but cannot be reproduced by an unauthorized party (28). Another anti-piracy method simply puts holograms on parts of an optical disc that are not read by the laser. Current technology limits this method to being a mere deterrent, but eventually it may be possible for computers to automatically distinguish legitimate software from illegitimate software by looking for an authenticating hologram on the installation discs.

Software is expensive, but the only way to keep making progress is to keep the software companie

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