Protection against copying of a circuit design

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Not so. If it's a good niche product, nobody will want to fight you for half of a small market. And they will have an impossible uphill battle convincing the customer base to buy a ripoff, to betray a trusted supplier.

Quality, service, honesty, dependability matter more than circuits to lots of customers.

John

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One of my most hilarious events was when a competitor WAY underbid a project. The customer accepted my bid and said, "Who-the-hell did they think they were trying to fool?"

...Jim Thompson

One day Harry, from Los Alamos, dropped by my office and asked me if we could do a CAMAC time-to-digital converter, to replace some crappy LeCroy modules. We said yes, we did a prototype (not a copy), it worked, so he went out for bids on 20 units. LeCroy smelled competition and cut their bid price *in half*. Harry still bought ours. That order got us into the picosecond timing business.

John

What all the protectionists miss: Any decent EE can start with the inputs and outputs and come up with either an identical or a much better way of doing the same thing.

Worse yet, the fact that you are even pissing around with protection removes skills and times from improving the product itself.

The classic example of this was an early Commodore computer..

Initially there were holes for extra RAM.

People started adding their own RAM, so Commodore drilled out the holes to prevent this from happening.

The cost of drilling out the holes greatly exceeded the cost of providing extra RAM in the first place.

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

Trivial with practice.

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Except that, since the original designer is so paranoid about protection, the ripoff will likely be BETTER designed, marketed, and promoted.

What about adding extra do nothing circuitry? Connected but ultimately not essential for operation.

I do agree all of these are waste of time.

They also modified the printer connection to prevent after market printers being used. Didn't help.

That's for sure. We got so good at breaking software protection on TRS-80s that we regarded it as a free puzzle you got with the product.

On the Model III, Radio Shack locked the protections up much, much tighter. I was able to demonstrate to them that I could break it in under 2 minutes with no tools except those provided by the OS.

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Speak for yourself. Only two of my products have ever been copied, and both copies were so bad that practically nobody bought them.

John

It probably was still a correct *business* decision. If they added the RAM and disabled it (for product differentiation) it would have driven hobbyists nuts until they found out how to make it work. Nothing much they can do with holes. There are always a number of people who will pay a bunch more to get the "deluxe" version, and a bunch of people who will happily buy a stripped-down version to save a few dollars. If you don't provide those options, they may go elsewhere.

It's analogous to the software that is $3K, $5K or $20K depending on how much money you pay to get what set of random-looking characters from the supplier. Even if you buy the cheap one you get all the bytes, but they are disabled.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Besides,you would never want to work for a company that draws that much distinction between the casual dress days and the clothing optional ones.

The one I liked was the copy protection Adobe used for early fonts.

It was absolutely uncrackable except by a patient seventh grader.

Turns out all you had to do was add a bogus character and have the built-in error reporter tell you your progress to date.

More at

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

In 6th grade we used this math tutortial software (on Apple II's) that had a password protected mode to view all the student's progress. It very conveniently aborted the password entry prompt as soon as you hit one wrong character. Sheesh!

The password was "@IT", and as a kid it did take me a little bit to realize that the first character didn't have to be a letter.

They could have put Apple into a world of hurt if they had refused to sell them 6502 processors, after buying MOS technology.