I work in IT at a medical company in West Chester. I spend a good amount of time installing and uninstalling software for people. I have memorized the Company’s Windows XP Site license key due to repetition: (MTT73 4D6YH 7P947 9DDRG **** (last 5 removed so I don’t get in trouble or something)).
Most programs that I install make you jump through some stupid hoop to make sure that you’ve bought it. Some are as simple as entering a key, but other programs like Adobe Acrobat make you go through ‘activation’ where you send your key and some information to adobe and they tell you whether or not your installation is valid. The goal is to prevent people from installing the same copy on multiple machines.
If you want to move a copy from one machine to another, you need to ‘deactivate’ the first copy and then reactivate the second copy. If (for example) a computer becomes corrupted and you reformat it, you won’t be able to deactivate the first copy, so when you want to reinstall it you have to call them and talk on thephone with some dude, who then enters information for you and lets you reactivate your software. This process takes about 15 minutes.
The thing is, all this copy protection software does is waste my time. Anyone with a little knowledge can easily find themselves a pirated copy, and anyone with a little more advanced knowledge can break the protection on their own. I understand that the goal of copy protection is to prevent people from using it illegitimately, and I can see why it would prevent joe casaul from deciding he’ll skirt copyright law, but I submit that for the most part, software protection mechanisms do little more than waste the time of legitimate users, while posing little more than a nuisance for those using the software illegally. It would probably be easier for me to download an illegal copy and install that on people’s machines because then I wouldn’t have to waste time going through that stupid ‘activation’ feature.