Historically, safeguards against pirating have been unsuccessful. Perhaps the only real ironclad anti-pirating scheme has been the dongle–a small device you plug into a peripheral port (USB today, Serial in the past) which must be present in order for the software to work. Naturally, this cannot be used often (else we’d have twenty or thirty dongles hanging off our machines); it has been used mostly with specific, often professional-level, and usually expensive software packages. But since it requires a specific piece of hardware, it has been a good protection against piracy–perhaps the only one.

One of the problems with anti-piracy is that you risk alienating the customer. At most, the paying customer should have to type in a serial number at the start, and then not have to worry about anything else while using the product. But serial numbers can be copied, and usually are. New versions can be released that reject the often-used serial numbers that get distributed by pirates, but new serial numbers just get passed around. On the Mac platform, there is even a special piece of software, called “iSerial Reader,” that reads a data package called “Serial Box,” which someone updates and releases every month; the list of software included in pretty exhaustive. For Windows, there are similar lists, and there are also “keygen” programs that will dynamically generate serial numbers for software.

More stringent forms of anti-piracy have been tried, but they usually backfire: hackers always find a way to get around the protections, so pirates are not affected, while legitimate, paying customers are much more inconvenienced. Many schemes have been tried in the past, and honest people have often gotten burned–software that locks up, software that can’t be re-copied if your system is re-installed, so forth and so on. Microsoft and Adobe are among the companies that have tried “activation,” which requires you to contact the company and effectively tie your copy of the software to your machine, after confirming the actual purchase. But there are activation cracks and patches all over the ‘net now, meaning that while you, who shelled out hard-earned cash for the product, are waiting on hold to talk to a service rep to activate your software, pirates have already breezed through on their own.

One very controversial way to stop pirating is to use the user’s connection to the Internet. Since most people log on to the Internet every day, why not put a feature in the software that, when the software is opened, it looks for the Internet connection, and when it finds it, it calls home. Then the software company can collect data on who has unique serial numbers and clean software, and which of the users are being naughty. Adobe tried this, as did other companies. The problem: it is considered spying, and an illegal breach of privacy.

Microsoft’s recent solution, however, is a variation on that theme. Since any company will release new software updates on a regular basis, why not use that window of opportunity? So when you want to get Internet Explorer 7, for example, you have to wait a moment during the installation process while Microsoft comes at you through your DSL connection, searches your computer for pirated software, and then gives you the all-clear to go ahead and get the new goodies. I’m not sure why people who would not accept the “call home” invasion of privacy would be just fine with this new “wait while we validate all your software” scheme, but it seems to be sailing through without a firestorm of any sort, despite being almost as intrusive. In fact, since the process potentially allows Microsoft to check not just the software being installed, but virtually all the software on your system, it seems far more intrusive. But, so far, I haven’t heard any objections beyond a few simple comments of distaste.

So we now get to the original question: will Microsoft’s new scheme actually work? Or will pirates find a way to circumvent all of this strip-search stuff while the paying customer has his hands up against the wall and hears the latex snap? If history is any guide, the answer is easy: of course they will. If not immediately, then over time. They always have, except for the dongle solution.

I recall a story from a few years back, where a giant corporation spent huge amounts of money developing a copy-protection system for optical discs with media on them. After spending untold millions, after many years of research, followed by a big public debut where they claimed the system would stop pirates cold, the copy-protection scheme was defeated in a matter of hours by a hacker, using nothing more than a felt-tipped pen. Apparently, all you had to do was cover over the part of the disc that had the copy protection on it, and the whole thing was defeated.

Microsoft’s new system may be a bit harder to beat than that, but one rarely loses money gambling on the resourcefulness of pirates. They will very likely soon find a way to patch the license files in a way that will fool Microsoft’s activation measures, even if it has to be dynamically updated each time Microsoft catches on–though it’s more likely that the pirates will find ways to make it too hard for Microsoft to differentiate between pirates and legitimate users. If Microsoft’s system is much better than that and can’t be beaten dynamically, it might even force pirates to create what you might call “pirate system environments”–instead of interacting with Microsoft to get updates which require validation, instead you wait for the pirates to hack each update as it comes out, adding it to your system after it becomes defanged. This would circumvent the validation process and keep Bill Gates’ nose out of your underwear.

In the end, it may just be necessary for these big corporations to be satisfied with the billions they make, and stop obsessing on every dime they miss–mostly because they don’t really miss out on much. After all, just as with shoplifting, the cost of software piracy is included in the legitimate price of the software. Already bearing that burden, it’s the legitimate users who, in the end, are most inconvenienced by the anti-pirating measures anyway. And let’s face it, the software giants who will benefit from Microsoft’s new scheme are very hard to feel sympathy for, despite recent attempts to look all doe-eyed and weepy.

Microsoft is now announcing, in defense of their new scheme, that “software piracy is not a victimless crime.” Yeah, but when the victim is Bill Gates, and the crime leaves him with fifty billion dollars instead of sixty billion dollars, it’s kind of hard to get all worked up about it, especially when Gates says that the answer is the crawl up your backside with a microscope after you forked over hundreds of dollars to him.