File Copy Prevention

Factual Questions
1

Does anyone know how to prevent a user from copying a file?

Here is my predicament. I’ve been given the task of making our software work with only one database. The company is going to move over to a price per amount of data for the software products. They want the user to pay for only having so much data. If they wish to add more data to the database then they will have to pay to increase the amount of data that the database can store. I’ve thought about putting some sort of encrypted key inside the database and have the software check for that key. If the user tries using a different database the software won’t see that key and it won’t work. However, what is to prevent the user from copying that record in the database over to the new database? I began wondering if there was a way to prevent the user from copying files or renaming files. This way they couldn’t rename or change their database file.

Can anyone think of any other possible solutions?

Thanks.

2

If you’re lucky this database will reside on a Novell server which has a Copy Inhibit attribute on files.

I don’t think Windows has an equivalent but I’m not sure.

Beyond that I don’t know. There may be some third party stuff that can help.

from a programming standpoint you can have the database check some hardware related info as a copy check like the MAC address of the NIC. Of course if they change the NIC you’ll get an angry call but I’ve seen software do this before.

3

Try searching at download.com for a file protection program, they should have some ideas.