Looking for Copy Protection for CD's

[TheRic]

The president of my company asked me to look into finding a copy protection program for our Cd's. Looking for something for a simple, cheap, good, copy protection program to use on CDs. We have manuals that we burn onto CDs. These manuals are copy righted, and are considered great reference manuals in their field. The manuals are PDF's, also on the CD's are some programs that we wrote.

We are talking about making maybe 10-20 CD's a year. If we would redo them and send everyone new CDs, we are talking about less than 500 CDs. As you can see we don't need them mass produced.

Thanks for any and all help!!

[pierhogunn]

password protect your PDF's

[Tequila]

Gotta ask, what kind of manuals are they? Is it something that would likely get shared all over the place, or is it pretty industry specific? Who are the end users going to use this info? Can you just put it on a website requiring login?

The reason I ask is that there's different levels of risk and different ways to mitigate each of them. The best systems I've seen use online authentication to allow you to open a program or document, but they don't work so well when you've got a tech who doesn't have internet access.

In my experience, there's nothing you can do to copy-protect a CD that doesn't have bad unintended consequences.

[final_t]

25+ years in the software business says don't bother, you will just wind up really upsetting (read: p!ssing off) your users who will want to copy the PDF file to their local drive, or print them out to read while they are using them in the field. So they will always, always, always find a way to crack it (remember that BluRay was unbeatable), faster if you make the reward (using it in the manner that they, the buyer, wants to) worth the hassle.
Also, exactly what Tequila says. Might also want to look into just making them downloadable on your company's web site that requires them to have a registered user to access, etc.
Seriously, work to make the customer happy, not to treat them like criminals.

[TheRic]

The manuals are industry specific, but there is nothing secret in them per se. They are mostly a collection of bits and pieces of thousands of research projects (Gov, universities, individual, our own, etc.). They were mostly pulled together by one of our employees, who has probably worked 10,000+ hours on this over the past 20+ years. We have a copyright on it (didn't know that till this AM).

Password protecting it won't keep people from copying the CD or just saving the PDF to the computer then burning it to CD. Don't think we need something high priced. More along the lines of keeping the honest people honest. Told the Pres. some of the down sides / hassles with having it copy protected. He still wanted me to look into it.

The people using it will not always be around the internet. One of the reasons we moved it to a CD was to keep them from having to lug 2 large three ring binders around.

[final_t]

Ask on Slashdot, but you'll get a jolly rogering there (in the British sense). But in any case, what, exactly, is his specific, keeping him up at night, worry?

Quoting others:
(...) the problem with “keeping honest people honest” is that it’s an oxymoron. The very definition of an honest person is that they can be trusted even when nobody is checking up on them. Nothing needs to be done to keep honest people honest, just as nothing needs to be done to keep tall people tall.

[Tequila]

Password protecting it won't keep people from copying the CD or just saving the PDF to the computer then burning it to CD. Don't think we need something high priced. More along the lines of keeping the honest people honest. Told the Pres. some of the down sides / hassles with having it copy protected. He still wanted me to look into it.

Honest people are already honest. You don't need to keep them that way. What your pres is asking for is the holy grail of software protection. There's nothing out there that will do what you want without inconveniencing the people who already want to pay for your services.

[LinuxRandal]

The manuals are industry specific, but there is nothing secret in them per se. They are mostly a collection of bits and pieces of thousands of research projects (Gov, universities, individual, our own, etc.). They were mostly pulled together by one of our employees, who has probably worked 10,000+ hours on this over the past 20+ years. We have a copyright on it (didn't know that till this AM).

Password protecting it won't keep people from copying the CD or just saving the PDF to the computer then burning it to CD. Don't think we need something high priced. More along the lines of keeping the honest people honest. Told the Pres. some of the down sides / hassles with having it copy protected. He still wanted me to look into it.

The people using it will not always be around the internet. One of the reasons we moved it to a CD was to keep them from having to lug 2 large three ring binders around.

No two ways around it. Get a lawyer NOW! Your already dealing with multiple layers of copyright. Government stuff is not copyrightable (see Slashdot about the Air Force commercial), Schools can have different forms of copyright, etc.....

If you disallow someone to copy something that was released under some form of Creative common's license (used by some in schools), you risk fines and loss of rights to distribute. (other licenses, may have other restrictions, etc..........)

[TheRic]

Thanks everyone for your help. You pretty much confirmed what I thought, and found out after doing some research into it. It's just not worth the hassle and / or cost.

To clear up a few things.
We are a lab, specializing in soil analysis. What is in the soil, and what does it need to make XXXXX grow. For example about 175 of the top 200 golf courses in the world are tested at our lab. This is just a small part(but well known) of the soils we test. The manuals are given to our "consultants" once they qualify / past the tests.

The person who "assembled" the manuals is internationally known for his work (not the manuals). I know he gets permission to use / include pieces from research projects. Sometimes we are part of the research projects, we do the testing, in exchange we get the rights to use any parts of the research results. We have a law firm on retainer not to mention speed dial . I'm sure all legal things were checked before we got the copyright.

Again, thanks everyone for your help.