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The Activation Wizard in Office 2010. When installing a retail copy of Windows or Office, the user is asked to input a unique product key supplied on a certificate of authenticity included with the program, which is later verified during activation. [1]
Microsoft then rolled out product activation in its flagship Microsoft Office 2000 product. All retail copies sold in Australia , Brazil , China , France , and New Zealand , and some sold in Canada and the United States , required the user to activate the product via the Internet.
Software cracking contributes to the rise of online piracy where pirated software is distributed to end-users [2] through filesharing sites like BitTorrent, One click hosting (OCH), or via Usenet downloads, or by downloading bundles of the original software with cracks or keygens. [4] Some of these tools are called keygen, patch, loader, or no ...
Product key on a Proof of License Certificate of Authenticity for Windows Vista Home Premium. A product key, also known as a software key, serial key or activation key, is a specific software-based key for a computer program. It certifies that the copy of the program is original. Product keys consist of a series of numbers and/or letters.
A software license is a legal instrument that governs the usage and distribution of computer software. [1] Often, such licenses are enforced by implementing in the software a product activation or digital rights management (DRM) mechanism, [2] seeking to prevent unauthorized use of the software by issuing a code sequence that must be entered into the application when prompted or stored in its ...
The economic loss caused by digital piracy before the year 2000 is estimated to be worth $265B and in 2004 it was found that 4% of box office receipts were lost. Both piracy and economic losses due to piracy are trending upwards. Lost revenues due to digital piracy were estimated to reach $5 billion by the end of 2005.
DRM became a major concern with the growth of the Internet in the 1990s, as piracy crushed CD sales and online video became popular. It peaked in the early 2000s as various countries attempted to respond with legislation and regulations and dissipated in the 2010s as social media and streaming services largely replaced piracy and content providers elaborated next-generation business models.
A key generator [1] [2] [3] is a protocol or algorithm that is used in many cryptographic protocols to generate a sequence with many pseudo-random characteristics. This sequence is used as an encryption key at one end of communication, and as a decryption key at the other.