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From: hartnegg@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de (Klaus Hartnegg)
Subject: Volume serial number as copy protection?
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.124820.2501@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de>
Organization: Rechenzentrum der Universitaet Freiburg, Deutschland
References: <Jun.17.11.48.11.1991.497@khazad-dum.rutgers.edu> <2442@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 91 12:48:20 GMT
Lines:       26

bxw@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au (Brad Willcott) writes:

>As far as runtime protection is concerned, an installation program could 
>modify the 'exe' of the application it was installing, to embed the volume
>serial number into it.  This would negate problems with backing up the hard
>disk system, and also with defragmenting the protected files.  They would 
>not be 'position' sensitive.

I hope all people implementing this in their programs know
very well what they are doing. If this serial number is also 
written to the install disks then this could make it impossible 
to reinstall it on a garbled hard disk because once reformatted it
is very likely to have a different volume serial number.

Also I sometimes have to move programs from one partition
to another to make room free for different things. This will
also make such a program think it was a pirate copy.

A protection scheme that does not at the same time cause
a lot or problems for legal users has not yet been invented!
-- 
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