Protection against copying of a circuit design

[Bret Ludwig]

They encourage people to want to. Few do it, and they have to at
least buy one to start.
Try lead shot in the resin, after a thin nonconductive coating on the
traces/leads.


A few dollars vs. in some cases a $5000 product.
I find that tough to believe. RAM was expensive. Drill bits were
cheap.

Except that Commodore not once ever made a correct business decision.

--

While that's a tough statement to refute, that doesn't mean making it
tough for copyists is bad business.

If you make it a hell of a good challenge, you will do a fair
business specifically to crackers, whackers and so forth who never
would have bought them for the value of the item itself. In addition,
each cracker will have to permanently deface and make unremerchantable
the test unit if you do a good job.

I can think of a number of relatively mundane products in specialized
niches that have not been cracked that have been available for years.
They are profitable products.

Philbrick made the solid state operational amplifier module that was
an insanely profitable little bastard for years and no one else ever
successfully cracked it until it became a moot point via the op amp IC
being cheaply available.

There are a cornucopia of little plug in "power enhancers" for cars
and truck and agricultural diesel engines, all of which work on the
principle of altering the analog or digital inputs from sensors on the
engine to the ECU. Most are designed for easy removal so when the
engine blows up the customer can remove them and say "Who, Me?" to the
dealer. Most are constructed to be tough to reverse engineer. The
makers are not stupid.

Ironically, a very successful aftermarket product for the Amiga,
which DID, like several aftermarket Amiga products, make the builder a
fair profit, was the notorious Emplant. With the Emplant and the right
magic code plugs your Amiga was a Macintosh....and an Atari....and a
Sun workstation....and a Next box. It was very cunningly designed and
was a good example of a seemingly straightforward product that wasn't,
because of a stellar bit of misdirection that has AFAIK never come out
yet.

 

[Bret Ludwig]

The key point is that virtually all "anti-copy" measures are PRO COPY in
the challenges they present.

--

Do it well enough and you will have a market from crackers alone.

There are people who make it a business to break stuff by Mosler and
Diebold: some are criminals, some security consultants, and a few just
extremely eccentric hobbyists. Mosler and Diebold are happy to sell
them to all comers.

 

[Bret Ludwig]

Well, I heard about a guy who taped razor blades around the gas cap of
his car because it was getting stolen. Blood and no gas missing the
first morning, but the next morning his windshield was smashed.

Shoulda put shellfish toxin on the razor blades....;-)

 

[Bret Ludwig]

Toasters are sold with lots of liability insurance for the
manufacturer. Do you have millions to spend on liability insurance,
every year?

Yes, but they sell millions of toasters too.

 

[Bret Ludwig]

If your idea is any good, it WILL be stolen.
End of story.

Except copying someone else's idea is not really stealing. It's how
anyone learns to do anything.

Intellectual Property is protected by patents, copyrights,
trademarks, and a couple of other specific things. If someone's
copying is not an infringement under those provisions it is legal.

That doesn't mean you have to make it easy. Make it tough and make
them buy at least one and wreck it, and spend some time on reverse
engineering it.

Or take the opposite tack: Put out a service manual so explicit
anyone could build one from it-and sell the product on serviceability
and open design at a reasonable price.

Consider that many things are valuable BECAUSE they are a copied
design. Small block Chevy engines, M1911 pistols, Fender guitars and
several other things can be built out of off the shelf parts from many
vendors, and in most cases the parts are profitable to the suppliers.
If you need a pickup or a bridge for a Fender bass, a barrel for a GI .
45 or any of dozens of intake manifolds, camshafts, or pistons for a
1955-1995 GM car with a Chevy V8, they are cheap and plentiful.

 

[neon]

patents in electronics are to keep honest people from copying. i can copy anything that i can get my hands on or reverse engineering but i will not do that. ereasing parts makes difficult but not inpossible. same thing for encasing into epoxy.

 

[gem1144aaa]

hi
try to put microcontroller in u desigen and then protect it

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Most are constructed to be tough to reverse engineer. The
makers are not stupid.

In general I often think there's an inverse correlation between the complexity
of a device and how obsessed people seem to be with "protecting" it. So,
sure, those engine tweakers are hard to "reverse engineer" insofar as
obtaining a schematic and firwmare, but simply redesigning the product from
scratch is not particularly difficult at all -- as seen by the many different
models to choose from.

Ironically, a very successful aftermarket product for the Amiga,
which DID, like several aftermarket Amiga products, make the builder a
fair profit, was the notorious Emplant. With the Emplant and the right
magic code plugs your Amiga was a Macintosh....and an Atari....and a
Sun workstation....and a Next box.

Yes, but not very well.

I remember the Eggplant, as it was called, and my recollection is that the
"hardware" was just a dongle -- the actual "product" was a 100% software
emulator, with the dongle just authorizing the code's execution. Nothing
wrong with the guy trying to charge whatever he wants for the software.

It was very cunningly designed and
was a good example of a seemingly straightforward product that wasn't,
because of a stellar bit of misdirection that has AFAIK never come out
yet.

Most emulators like that have always catered to a realtively niche market -- I
suspect it was more a case of no one cared to bother to try to crack it (or at
least no one particularly good ) than any super-secret-unbreakable
technique on the part of the designer.

I do remember attempting to copy a game disc once (that would have been the
mid-'80s) and, upon trying to load the copy, getting this nice, long,
smooth-scrolling treatise on why piracy was bad and you shouldn't do it. That
was almost a reward in itself, getting to see that.

---Joel

 

[Bret Ludwig]

In general I often think there's an inverse correlation between the complexity
of a device and how obsessed people seem to be with "protecting" it. So,
sure, those engine tweakers are hard to "reverse engineer" insofar as
obtaining a schematic and firwmare, but simply redesigning the product from
scratch is not particularly difficult at all -- as seen by the many different
models to choose from.

Yes, it's easy to do.

Yes, but not very well.

Well, the floppies were the issue. Apple used proprietary floppy
formatting and you had to have their drive.

There were several Mac emulators that basically gave the Mac Toolbox
ROM a hardware interface and some boot code.

I remember the Eggplant, as it was called, and my recollection is that the
"hardware" was just a dongle -- the actual "product" was a 100% software
emulator, with the dongle just authorizing the code's execution. Nothing
wrong with the guy trying to charge whatever he wants for the software.


Most emulators like that have always catered to a realtively niche market -- I
suspect it was more a case of no one cared to bother to try to crack it (or at
least no one particularly good ) than any super-secret-unbreakable
technique on the part of the designer.

The full value of the Emplant was never really exploited: it was sold
as a Mac emulator, which it was, but much more. The problem was that
Apple started selling low end Macs reasonable and there was little
appeal for Emplant anymore. Very few people wanted the other systems,
although it was well conceded NeXT had the greatest desktop box in
history. They were way ahead of the game to be sure.