Selling your Product

I have a product about to go on the market. Solely through Download. No CD's.

My question is. I want to ensure that i get paid for this product and it is not just downloaded by one person and then sent around for free to everyone else.

Now i can add a password to it. But that is weak. Anyone can just mail the password along with the exe. So i was looking for soemthing that is individual to each user.

Any ideas on how i can do this?

I realize there is no way to totaly protect myself but i want to make it as hard as possible for this program to be duplicated.

You will have to search the forums

There are many nifty tricks and ideas of members that are for this topic ;)

You could download an Active lock OCX for your program. Temporary usage with expiration date and then you need an unlock key to make it function after the expiration date...

http://members.tripod.com/cuinl/down...x.nslock15.zip

i think the best solution for this kind of problem is a Hardware lock.
other wise u can store some unique informaiton (about installed application) on user's system in some hard to locate form which will be crosschecked each time your application runs.

Well that is the same thing as using a password. THe problem with a password is that it has to be hardcoded. Which means once one person has the password or one of the possible passwords then everyone might as well have it.

I want a way to make each copy have it's own password. So people can't just send the password with the exe and then have it work.

I was thinking something like having the user get some info from thier comp and then enter that info on the webpage when they pay for and download the program and then have the password based off that user info. And have it encoded. My program would gather this data and encoded it the same way and then i would have an individual passsword for each user.

The thing is what is different on each persons comp but is easily accessable even for a novice computer user.

Get their program on their comp to send their hard drive serial to you.

Then you Xor (or something) that serial and return their code...

This is what I do.
I have written two applications that are being sold on the internet, and are selling extremely well I might add.

Now. When someone buys the product off the regnow.com site, they send an email through to me. I have an app here that checks for mail every so often. If it receives an email from regnow, it parses it, and then modifies the source code for the application the person bought accordingly.

The very top of the main module for the source looks like this :

VB Code:

Public Const regName As String = "!!!!REGNAME!!!!"
Public Const regEmail As String = "!!!!REGEMAIL!!!!"
Public Const regAddress As String = "!!!!REGADDRESS!!!!"

And basically, the app that checks the mail changes the "!!!!...!!!!" parts according to what was in the email from regnow. Then it shells vb6.exe to compile the source code.
There's a Do Loop, and doesnt exit until all the *.obj files are gone and a new .exe appears.
Then I shell out to winzip to zip the executable, and create an email. The zip file is then sent with a thank-you note to the person.

Now. When the app runs, the splash screen shows the user registration information. So the person won't be in a hurry to spread it around the net :)

Anyway, my apps have yet to be spread around.
Not warez'd yet.