LiveCode Forums.

Yeah, I was being too Mac-centric. On second thought though, maybe knowing the drive name isn't necessary. A copied app could easily be on a thumb drive.

This solution was proposed as a security measure but is not really secure…

So whether drive letter or volume name or even knowing it is running from a USB drive using something like Linux’s usbUtils, this won’t prevent anyone from copying to usb and using anywhere/anyway.

Hard to prevent that kind of thing so you’re better off relying on some serial number scheme and preferably something that phones home, but that may be more work than it’s worth.

Less arduous but slightly better than the OP method would be to have an invisible licence file on the drive, or derive some unique id from the drive hardware. None of this is completely secure but maybe better that just knowing its on a flash drive…

The old thread I posted was referring to a task where someone wanted to implement a security measure like this, by interrogating the volumes and extracting the unique id of the removable device. There were some code samples based on vbcript usage to do this on Windows.
I don't know if this is still relevant today.

Thanks everyone for your kind interest. I thought I had a solution for anti-copying, but no, it was not to be. I guess I'll just have to live with that, and hope customers may be put off by some disinformation, or something like that.

Most software problems have been encountered by other publishers over the years. Before attempting novel solutions it's often useful to see how others have solved what we're facing, and do what they do.

With license enforcement, if you have a web server you can require the user to register the product.

It won't stop 100% of piracy (nothing does), but when registration is tied to email relatively few years are willing to pass around their email address. The sort of person who creates disposable email addresses to circumvent copyright enforcement mechanisms is unlikely to ever be a paying customer anyway, so even an imperfect solution means no significant loss among actual potential customers.

Many thanks Richard, I'll keep that in mind..