Do it well enough and you will have a market from crackers alone.
There are people who make it a business to break stuff by Mosler and Diebold: some are criminals, some security consultants, and a few just extremely eccentric hobbyists. Mosler and Diebold are happy to sell them to all comers.
Shoulda put shellfish toxin on the razor blades....;-)
Yes, but they sell millions of toasters too.
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Except copying someone else's idea is not really stealing. It's how anyone learns to do anything.
Intellectual Property is protected by patents, copyrights, trademarks, and a couple of other specific things. If someone's copying is not an infringement under those provisions it is legal.
That doesn't mean you have to make it easy. Make it tough and make them buy at least one and wreck it, and spend some time on reverse engineering it.
Or take the opposite tack: Put out a service manual so explicit anyone could build one from it-and sell the product on serviceability and open design at a reasonable price.
Consider that many things are valuable BECAUSE they are a copied design. Small block Chevy engines, M1911 pistols, Fender guitars and several other things can be built out of off the shelf parts from many vendors, and in most cases the parts are profitable to the suppliers. If you need a pickup or a bridge for a Fender bass, a barrel for a GI .
45 or any of dozens of intake manifolds, camshafts, or pistons for a 1955-1995 GM car with a Chevy V8, they are cheap and plentiful.
In general I often think there's an inverse correlation between the complexity of a device and how obsessed people seem to be with "protecting" it. So, sure, those engine tweakers are hard to "reverse engineer" insofar as obtaining a schematic and firwmare, but simply redesigning the product from scratch is not particularly difficult at all -- as seen by the many different models to choose from.
Yes, but not very well. :-)
I remember the Eggplant, as it was called, and my recollection is that the "hardware" was just a dongle -- the actual "product" was a 100% software emulator, with the dongle just authorizing the code's execution. Nothing wrong with the guy trying to charge whatever he wants for the software.
Most emulators like that have always catered to a realtively niche market -- I suspect it was more a case of no one cared to bother to try to crack it (or at least no one particularly good :-) ) than any super-secret-unbreakable technique on the part of the designer.
I do remember attempting to copy a game disc once (that would have been the mid-'80s) and, upon trying to load the copy, getting this nice, long, smooth-scrolling treatise on why piracy was bad and you shouldn't do it. That was almost a reward in itself, getting to see that. :-)
---Joel
Yes, it's easy to do.
Well, the floppies were the issue. Apple used proprietary floppy formatting and you had to have their drive.
There were several Mac emulators that basically gave the Mac Toolbox ROM a hardware interface and some boot code.
The full value of the Emplant was never really exploited: it was sold as a Mac emulator, which it was, but much more. The problem was that Apple started selling low end Macs reasonable and there was little appeal for Emplant anymore. Very few people wanted the other systems, although it was well conceded NeXT had the greatest desktop box in history. They were way ahead of the game to be sure.
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