Mark H. Wood wrote:
As others have noted, this may be doable but it's the wrong approach.
You are trying to solve a legal problem with information technology.
It is very rare for such an approach to accomplish much, other than to
irritate customers who are behaving properly.
MAC address is a particularly poor choice:
o Many hosts have multiple NICs. Which MAC address is used?
o NICs fail and must be replaced. Now your legitimate customer's
product accuses him of theft.
o Customer backs up failing host A and restores on new host B.
Legally licensed product again refuses to run, because host B has
different NIC(s).
Having to re-register a product for reasons unrelated to the product
is a negative Customer Experience, and the marketplace will punish
such designs.
IMO that kind of depends on exactly how you handle the detection of a
change. If you include MAC address, CPU ID, disk serial number, etc,
and allow 1 of them to change without any issues, then most random
hardware failures won't cause problems. If they move to a completely
new machine, but you politely post a nag screen that says something to
the effect "New hardware detected; please contact Mycompany within 30
days for a new license", then that's not likely to offend many customers.
You could also have it "phone home" once a day (or once a week, or
whatever) with an app's internal key value, and if you get two
connections from the same ID value, then you know there are multiple
copies running. That one can be defeated if a customer has the
technical skills and really wants to, but if the key has internal
checksums and is reasonably complex, it will catch most casual copiers.
Nothing short of a hardware dongle will stop a determined hacker, but
there are fairly simple ways to keep honest customers honest, by not
tempting them to take the easy, cheap way out.
JMHO,
D
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