Anti Piracy

Anti Piracy was the software industry's initial technical solution to the problem of managing software distribution. Anti Piracy followed the same principle of software licensing, that the software should not be installed on more PCs than permitted by the software licensing agreement, but above all Anti Piracy tried to prevent the software itself from being copied or distributed without permission.

In practice the Anti Piracy approach was expensive and difficult to administer, worse still it was extremely irritating to the end user, often causing significant delay between the user purchasing and being able to use their software, significantly damaging sales. The least user unfriendly techniques unfortunately proved the easiest to remove.