Since you asked …

A FEW WEEKS ago I was contacted by a market research firm working on a project for an unnamed software company. Their client wanted “a better understanding of how the market perceives anti-piracy initiatives, especially as they relate to product activation and registration,” and they were hoping I could share some of the feedback I’ve gleaned over the years on this subject from readers.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t usually participate market studies like this, but the questions they were asking made me stop and think. Not knowing which software company this was, it was possible they were sincere in wanting to know how their customers might react to their implementing product activation. If I don’t tell them, who will?

So, Dear Company X, thank you for asking, and I hope you don’t mind my sharing my answer with a few hundred thousand of my closest friends. How can you win greater customers for your anti-piracy and product activation efforts?

First off, don’t confuse the two because ultimately your customers won’t. If you implement product activation, you will fundamentally alter your customers’ perception of your company and their relationship with it. One thing I’ve seen very clearly is that software customers have a visceral loathing for any form of forced registration, what I’ve always called “registerware.”

Microsoft didn’t invent product activation — The Gripe Line has been hearing about the registerware of such companies as Autodesk, Computer Associates, and Intuit for many years. Registerware varies greatly in how much personal information the customer is forced to give as opposed to how much is supplied on a “voluntary” basis, and how clearly the distinction between the two is made. There can also be significant differences in the complexity of the registration process for the user, the ways the company makes use of the information it collects, and the systems the company puts in place for dealing with the inevitable problems any product activation scheme produces for customers.

In the end, though, none of those differences really matter, because customers hate the very idea of being forced to register their usage of a product they purchased. And why shouldn’t they? At best they suffer the inconvenience of going through a process that is, by necessity, at least somewhat convoluted. At worst (as we’ve been learning from Brian Livingston the last few weeks) they could be unfairly deprived of their legitimate right to use your product(see “XP and a product key” ). And for what? Few will believe preventing piracy is your primary motive.

Product activation obviously does nothing to deter the grossest forms of software piracy: all those counterfeit copies being hawked on the Internet. Microsoft and other registerware publishers always say that their registerware is not aimed at the real pirates but at “keeping the honest customers honest.” In other words, they’re more concerned about policing those whom they know have paid them good money rather than focusing on those they know haven’t.

Certainly it’s true that there is a real problem with what Microsoft calls “casual copying” of one legal copy by more people than have a right to do so. But even in that case, is product activation the logical way to fight it compared to other methods? I’m certainly no fan of copy protection devices such as the old-fashioned hardware dongles, but if you are really serious about stopping casual copying of your software, dongles are a well-debugged, cost-effective means of doing so. And they’ll produce far fewer false positives in detecting illegal copying than registerware schemes will. This in turn means not only that your customers will suffer fewer unnecessary inconveniences, but you’ll need far fewer bodies manning the phones to sit in judgment on customers’ pleas for reactivation.

Registerware makes little economic sense as a method for fighting piracy, so what are its real purposes? Many software publishers make it all too clear by their actions that their immediate goal is to acquire more personal and business information about their customers in order to “upsell” additional products and allow third parties marketing access. Product activation can also be used to enforce shrinkwrap license restrictions against what would otherwise be legal fair-use of a product, such as prohibiting transfer of a copy from one system to another. But the real motivation behind product activation goes deeper than that.

One of the first registerware products I ever heard about was Intuit’s Quickbooks 5.0, now over five years old. Just a few weeks ago, a reader wrote that the version of 5.0 he’s still using had suddenly ceased functioning and demanded he reenter the code number he’d received when he originally registered it. Not having had the foresight to save the slip of paper he’d written it down on all these years ago, he had to call Intuit. “They told us that QuickBooks can only be used a limited number of times unless one enters the registration code again,” the reader wrote. “We were told that it was impossible for them to give out any registration codes as this is an old product and no longer supported. However, they offered us a deal … if we would spend $99 for an upgrade, it would magically become possible for them to give us a registration code to make our old QuickBooks 5 run again! This is pure blackmail.” (At press time, Intuit officials had not confirmed or denied this policy.)

I think we all know instinctively that registerware or product activation is really about controlling, limiting, and ultimately terminating the customer’s use of your product at your discretion. If that’s what you’re really after in implementing product activation, fine. But don’t insult your customers by claiming it’s all for the sake of fighting piracy.