Software piracy prevention through digital rights management systems

Software publishers use Digital Rights Management, specifically copy-protection techniques, to prevent unauthorized and illegal copying of their software products. Common forms of prevention are copy-protection techniques based on physical tokens. While physical tokens provide better protection from unauthorized copying than intangible ones, the protected digital content becomes unsuitable for online distribution. This paper investigates the role of copy-protection techniques based on physical and intangible tokens in software piracy prevention. An internationally organized online survey among users of sequencer software, a particular kind of music software, provides the data for the subsequent descriptive analysis and logistic regression. Based on our findings, we present the general implications of our results for a software publisher's anti-piracy and online distribution policy.