The most common form of piracy by far. Most users don't intend on stealing - they just don't really care about your license terms. Adding hardware locking to your license can reduce casual sharing and multiple installs by innocent users.
Corporate and office workers will just install on any machine they see fit and share with anyone in the office. Most companies don't have a way to track and enforce license compliance so using hardware locking can help eliminate this inter-office sharing.
If its worth buying - its worth stealing. You may have resolved to just accept this theft as inevitable. It's not. A hardware locked license in combination with code encryption and tamper prevention can effectively eliminate pirated use of your software.
A customer purchases a license to use your software. You give them a serial number - used to identify their purchase. The user installs the software protected by a hardware locked license. The first time the software is used, they are prompted to enter their serial number.
DeployLX examines several hardware components on the machine to compute a unique machine fingerprint. DeployLX prompts the user to activate their software. The user elects to activate online automatically or offline by contacting customer service to obtain a manual activation key.
People hate copy protection. They just want to use "their software" the way they want. Love those customers with activation grace periods, hardware tolerance, system upgrades and software transfers with minimal fuss.
Completely automated, users can manage their software installs without ever contacting your support team. And you can trust that the software is still just as secure.
Each time the application runs DeployLX compares the current machine fingerprint to the original. As long as they match, within the specified tolerance, execution continues normally. If the fingerprint doesn't match, the user is prompted to activate again.
The machine fingerprint tolerance allows DeployLX to handle system upgrades without invalidating the license. It can even handle several incremental upgrades over time.
If the user wants to install the software on another machine they can deactivate it and install it on another machine. Running the deactivation wizard removes the activated license from the machine and releases the install back to the server. They can now install on a new machine without ever contacting customer service.