Some people emailed DelphiHater about NET piracy and asked DelphiHater's thoughts about it.
The first thing is the "required usage" of assemblies and "reflections" along with certain files to be installed. That makes it harder to pirate NET components.
Calling Home?
DelphiHater looked around and found most ASP.NET files "call-home" or have undocumented watermarks for the vendor to "check" around.
An example, someone deploys a pirated copy of [Product].NET along with his application, don't be surprised few months later, [vendor's] lawyers demand payment for the license... or expose that person as a software pirate. At the risk of being exposed a software pirate, the person will just pay-up.
A funny example, is when [vendor] watermarked "[product] beta" files with customer name, and someone got fired for leaking it out. it was funny because the person leaking it out didn't know about it, and make a ruckus on the vendor's forum. Unfortunately, most of the message on that vendor's forum were deleted.
How did the vendor know? the vendor implemented call home feature which used IE behind the scenes. With IE, unless you have good firewall, you don't know when it will "call home". Unfortunately for that person, most of the people who used that NET library didn't care.
On server environment, ASP.NET assemblies are given access to internet, and from-time-to-time, some of these call home with IP address, domain-name, and details such as usage and so on.
Watermarking, Part 2
Another funny example, specific to Delphi, is Help & Manual, if you have access to H&M private forums, you can read about the how Mr. Alexander Hasler from time to time googles around for "This help file is made with unregistered version of Help & Manual" (or something like that) and ask them to pay-up for the license. Since the help file is on web-site and the company's "contact-us" is known, it becomes simple to ask the website-owner to pay for his product.
Funny.
[Corrections]
The part referring to Help & Manual, there is only 1 post out of thousands of posts in Help & Manual private forums. The original post which referring to this article is deleted/ or not "topic not found".
The first thing is the "required usage" of assemblies and "reflections" along with certain files to be installed. That makes it harder to pirate NET components.
Calling Home?
DelphiHater looked around and found most ASP.NET files "call-home" or have undocumented watermarks for the vendor to "check" around.
An example, someone deploys a pirated copy of [Product].NET along with his application, don't be surprised few months later, [vendor's] lawyers demand payment for the license... or expose that person as a software pirate. At the risk of being exposed a software pirate, the person will just pay-up.
A funny example, is when [vendor] watermarked "[product] beta" files with customer name, and someone got fired for leaking it out. it was funny because the person leaking it out didn't know about it, and make a ruckus on the vendor's forum. Unfortunately, most of the message on that vendor's forum were deleted.
How did the vendor know? the vendor implemented call home feature which used IE behind the scenes. With IE, unless you have good firewall, you don't know when it will "call home". Unfortunately for that person, most of the people who used that NET library didn't care.
On server environment, ASP.NET assemblies are given access to internet, and from-time-to-time, some of these call home with IP address, domain-name, and details such as usage and so on.
Watermarking, Part 2
Another funny example, specific to Delphi, is Help & Manual, if you have access to H&M private forums, you can read about the how Mr. Alexander Hasler from time to time googles around for "This help file is made with unregistered version of Help & Manual" (or something like that) and ask them to pay-up for the license. Since the help file is on web-site and the company's "contact-us" is known, it becomes simple to ask the website-owner to pay for his product.
Funny.
[Corrections]
The part referring to Help & Manual, there is only 1 post out of thousands of posts in Help & Manual private forums. The original post which referring to this article is deleted/ or not "topic not found".
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