EE Times - Protecting Software IP
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Our VP of Products, Vic DeMarines, contributed an article to the April 20 issue of EE Times: "Protecting software IP: what engineers need to know." Here's an excerpt:
Intellectual property protection and piracy prevention are not new issues for software vendors, but strategies and opinions vary on how best to combat those threats.
Every successful independent software vendor has been the target of
visible piracy activity. In fact, the piracy groups boldly announce
their efforts in .NFO files and make the pirated software, or "cracked"
releases, available to various distribution channels, such as Secure
FTP, P2P, IRC and the Web.
The crackers use a combination of reverse-engineering tools, existing
knowledge bases and their machine code expertise to disable licensing
mechanisms within software. These same tactics can be used to gain
access to sensitive IP contained in software, which is more a threat from emerging competitors or foreign governments than from piracy groups.
Approaches for combating IP theft and piracy include software
protection technology and piracy business intelligence. Software
protection technology makes software resistant to reverse engineering
and tampering. It is not an absolute security measure, but a way of
making code difficult to disassemble and modify once compiled. Common
protection features include anti-debugging and code encryption.
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Recorded Webinar - Balancing Anti-Piracy Approaches with EU Privacy Regulations |
 Did you miss our recent webinar with attorney Alexander Duisberg from the Munich office of international law firm Bird & Bird? We had great content from Alexander and Vic and good questions from the audience. We covered:- Legal issues around automatic software auditing in the EU
- The types of data you can collect and those you must avoid collecting (and which geographies are more sensitive than others)
- How to manage privacy issues in a cross-border environment
- How software vendors have evolved their anti-piracy approaches to recover revenue
Watch Now |
RSA Conference 2009 Recap
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 The RSA Conference in San Francisco was interesting this year. While the trend of decreasing attendance seemed to continue, the conference remains an excellent venue for networking and reconnecting with peers and colleagues.
The conference is still very focused on perimeter security and anti-virus, but it's interesting to note that at least one third of the software vendors there have a problem with piracy (including some of the largest software vendors in the market).
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