The Cloud is Helping Software Developers Win the Fight Against Software Piracy

Once in a while, new technology comes with a number of benefits that were not part of the original specifications when the technology was being developed. Piracy control is certainly one such unintended benefit of cloud computing. The last few months have seen major initiatives on the protection of intellectual property. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was one such well known attempt. Many governments the world over are collaborating to reduce and control software piracy. The shutdown of sites such as Megaupload and the arrests of its owner and several employees from the US and New Zealand is an example. Now anti-piracy crusaders have another reason to cheer. Software that is being distributed via the SaaS (software as a service) model is much harder to misuse. Every user is authenticated and logged in and hacked accounts are far easier to control and resolve than bootlegged CDs. Is password sharing piracy? A recent study showed that a large percentage of users of cloud-based software freely admitted to sharing their passwords with co-workers. People do not feel this is wrong because after all only one user is logged in at a time. Whether this counts as piracy or not will depend on how your service agreement is worded. If however you can log in with the same credentials from multiple terminals then there is little doubt that there is misuse of your license – unless such use is allowed. Connectivity aids control Since all cloud computing is Internet-based, detection of piracy becomes fairly easy. Previously the hacker industry used to sell cracked versions of popular programs. Modern, cloud based software can easily determine if such a thing is happening and can take corrective action well before significant revenue loss occurs. There have also been concerns that hackers and pirates will set up dedicated “dark clouds” – a cloud platform specifically built to distribute pirated software and sell logins. However, such centers are bound to be detected and attacked by genuine distributors and it is very likely that these will be taken down and the pirates will be caught or forced to flee. Software companies are watching the emergence of dark clouds very closely. It is quite possible that by being able to access their software over the Internet, software companies will be able to control how their products are being used. There have also been reports that small software routines are being written to monitor the health of the main application. In case of a bug, they are able to detect excessive CPU use and illegal memory operations and control these in time before the application crashes. Similar software could be written to monitor piracy of software as well. Free software kills piracy There are other reasons why cloud computing is reducing software piracy. One of these is the use of “freemium” software. You start by using a light version of an application. This is often a free version and is designed to make you familiar with the software and understand its advantages. When your business needs to evolve, you graduate to a premium or a paid model. Since any user can experiment with a free instance of the software, the incentive to steal is lost.  Low cost of cloud applications is another reason why it is proving to be such a piracy killer. If you can get full capability and support for a few dollars, why would one settle for a pirated model? Although the issue appears simple in theory, there are some points that need to be resolved. A person could be logged into an application on his PC, smartphone and tablet. Are these log-ins legitimate or not? Analytic software being produced to manage piracy would have to understand this kind of use and device some means of handling this. While complex and more involved issues of piracy control will no doubt take time to develop, the fact remains that cloud computing has given software producers a new tool to control piracy. You may not have noticed it, but already we talk a lot less about software piracy. With the decline on piracy, the additional revenue that software companies will make will help them produce even better products and improve the viability of the industry.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.   About the Guest Author: Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.