title: Protecting Software from Pirates
body: <p>After reading numerous threads on Stack Overflow about how to protect software, I realized you can't. Thankfully my software is targetted at hosting businesses (not a lot of them at that) and a handful of consumers. I don't think the software will be popular enough that anyone is going to crack it, but I would like to protect it.</p>
  
  <p>In one of the threads I found, it had a list of half decent options. I have decided I would like to go with "Simple registration with revokable keys, verified online frequently."</p>
  
  <p>I figured since my application is a C# NET Console Application that will be ran through a management container, I can just issue keys for it. Perhaps do a MySQL Database and keep a list of keys that can only be used on one install, and another list of keys that can be used on X installs. My application will be ran with command line parameters at startup anyways, so adding one like "-key 29839X900AQ" or something will alleviate the need for them to have to really worry about it too much.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of any information/sites that offer help on setting something like this up?</p>