Adobe has succumbed. To use Creative Suite 2 applications, you must first activate the software. Just as Macromedia has shown us, software activation is an easy solution to a complicated problem. Software vendors combined lose about 30 billion USD a year due to software piracy. But is that an excuse to drop the problem in the paying customer’s lap? I don’t think so.

Let’s be honest, nobody loves to work and see that energy go to waste because of some hackers who can’t resist showing off their programming skills. Shareware programmers know the feeling: only 5% of the downloading crowd will actually pay for the program, and that’s 5% on average. My own experience with this concept has shown you can get lower conversion percentages ---easily.

My own reflex was to stop offering the product under the shareware concept and asking cold hard cash for every bit. I guess that same reflex lets company directors decide to opt for software activation. However, there’s a huge difference between my own decision and that of companies like Adobe. My decision did not interfere with the copy in the hands of paying customers. It only worked towards future downloaders. The party was over; no more free downloads.

But software activation gets in the paying customer’s way, every single time he has to reinstall his software. And believe me, that happens more than any OS vendor would care to admit. If you are used to running beta software, for example, you will regularly run into trouble. If you happen to run that software on your production machine ---not a good idea, I admit, but if you’re on a budget...--- the time will come that the whole system needs to be reinstalled to get things moving again.

Each time that happens, it’s “Licens transfer” and re-activation time all over again. If you’re like me, you get to forget about activation after a few months, and consequently forget to “transfer” your license before erasing your disk. The results is a software lock-up after x number of re-activations.

To me, that’s not a big deal. Most PR-agencies just send another CD, with another license and a fresh activation start. But most people who require this software for their daily work, pay good money for it, and the vendor may become very suspicious if you’re asking for a new set of CDs the third time you forgot to transfer your license.

You could argue I (and undoubtedly many others with me) shouldn’t forget about the activation feature. You could argue it’s a clear token of my sloppiness or forgetfulness, and I should be more conscious of what I’m doing. And you would probably be right on all accounts, except for the fact that it’s my good right to live the way I want, and not have to bother about license transfers at all.

In fact, I paid for that license and as such I am not supposed to take care of the vendor’s piracy problems. As a paying customer I should at least not be treated as the average criminal. I have paid, and so it would be logical to suppose that I for one am not going to crack the software.

Activation: what’s it worth anyway?

Vendors might also ask themselves the question if activation is going to stop hackers from cracking the code. The answer seems to be that it is not. In 2003, Jim Rapoza wrote an article on software activation covering Macromedia’s software being hacked despite activation within minutes after the program had been released.

From that early example, it must be clear to everyone that software activation won’t help. All it will do is provide the software vendor with more details about its customers. Perhaps paying customers should get a discount for that, instead of a few free fonts.

If activation doesn’t work, what does? As far as I know, the old dongle should do just fine. Apple uses an USB dongle with Logic Pro, and Alias uses one with MotionBuilder Pro. Neither will give more information on the difference between the two methods as far as piracy is concerned, but the fact that dongles are used instead of activation tells me it must work at least as good.

Of course, as long as there will be software, there will be piracy. Intellectual property, a qualification which software shares with music and books, has always been hard to enforce. Books can be copied and music can (and is) being replicated as mad. How do you defend yourself against that? Legally and technically, I suppose. I also suppose from what I know that legal protection is better than technical protection. Perhaps intellectual property should be taken just as serious as theft, with the same number or resources allocated to it and cross-border policing.

With China and other Far-East countries now increasingly realizing they have to play by the rules if they want to benefit from the Western eceonomic model, legal protection may well become the best defense against piracy. Maybe in the future we won’t have to be connected to the Internet for software activation purposes.