Intellectual Property Protection

The company I work for, a publishing company, is concerned about
unauthorized copying of its intellectual property when distributed by
mass-media like CDROM.

I have been tasked with finding a means of recognizing when one of
our copyrighted works is being copied.

It seems to me that what I should do is hook the keyboard, and buffer
what is being typed, and compare it to a database of copyrighted works.

When we detect that someone is copying our work, we disable the
keyboard -- except for BACKSPACE. And DELETE. And
LEFT-ARROW.

In order to prevent people from making illegal printouts of our
copyrighted works, it seems to me what I should do is hook the
CreateDC() function, and forward all requests to the original driver,
except DrvTextOut(). When what is being printed matches something
in our database, we disable the printer.

If we can also detect that the content is being displayed on two monitors
at the same time on dual-monitor systems, that would be great. If the
license lookup indicates that this is not allowed, then we can blank one
of the the screens.

Is it possible to blank just the secondary monitor? It does not matter
which, really. Blanking one makes the use compliant with the license.

In order to prevent people from making illegal copies, an upper-filter
on top of all the drive-stacks would be in order. All WRITE IRPs are
scanned and compared to the database, and if we detect that someone
is copying our work, we disable the disk drive.

Actually, that is probably going a little too far.

Maybe just write the string "PIRACY IS WRONG" in place of
the in-violation-of-copyright data?

Periodically we can make an internet connection to our server and
make sure all their licenses are in order.

So, is that it? Keyboard Hook, CreateDC Hook, and Upper Filters
across all drives. And require an internet connection and online
registration.

Ideally, we would deploy this on all computers, but intially we are
targetting only Windows computers.



.

Relevant Pages

  • [Patch 1/4] move XP and XPC to drivers/misc/sgi-xp -v4
    ... config FORCE_MAX_ZONEORDER ... See the file "COPYING" in the main directory of this archive ... similarity index 99% ... License. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: GPL V3 and Linux - Dead Copyright Holders
    ... > program version as you claim then how would you specify versions ... And likewise "How come the FSF itself, ... distributes its default COPYING file with code clearly intended ... everybody necessarily even includes the LICENSE file. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: Is reverse engineering legal ?
    ... So that copying action is certainly authorized, ... terms of the license. ... The claim is that the license is a copyright license. ... As such however it can only limit copying, ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Is reverse engineering legal ?
    ... > terms of the license. ... > As such however it can only limit copying, ... > purpose you please under copyright law. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: BBC tell whoppers on downloads
    ... Copyright protection only really became necessary when copying became ... reasonably cheap and easy. ... The license in effect becomes a license to print money, ... Unfortunately that sort of compromise isn't on the table, ...
    (uk.legal)