For both software publishers and niche developers, success in the software market all over the world depends on protection of intellectual property rights. There are several technologies and measures that are being taken to prevent the widepread software piracy happening all over the world. Software developers need to depend on a stable copy-protection technology along with efficient laws to protect their intellectual property rights. During the last few years, software piracy is becoming an ever increasing concern of individual software developers and large software development companies. Even if sales lost through software piracy do not bankrupt a company, the situation can stagnate future program improvements, which ultimately hurts the businesses that use the software. Individual software developers who earn a living by selling their software products and solutions face hard times when they find their software products pirated mercilessly.

Designed to protect software products from small-scale end-user applications to large-scale enterprise systems, Digital Lock copy-protection from CreateEvent Software is aimed at protecting your application from casual end-user copying, large-scale illegal duplication or counterfeiting and very large-scale illegal distribution of licensed software over the Internet. The goal is to prevent piracy with the maximum use of copy-protection technology so that individual software developers and software companies do not have to spend a lot on taking extra initiatives to stop piracy. Digital Lock can be discretely put into the password licensing type of software-only protection catagory. However, it has been designed with flexibility and extensibility in mind so that it inherits some features of network license management, can integrate with hardware key protection and is in fact, a generalized software copy-protection system for applications on 32-bit Windows platforms. Digital Lock also enables software developers to incorporate trial-ware functionality in their applications.

Digital Lock is a software development kit containing dynamic link libraries at its core, which can protect 32-bit Windows based software products from piracy. It has two basic parts:

1.The engine is a component that has methods for verification of trial quota, registration information, etc. and it is the part of Digital Lock that gets installed on the end-user machines along with the software products that it protects. The binary file for this component is DLEngine.dll.

2.The key generator is a component that can analyze a product ID obtained from the engine and generate the corresponding authorization key, which is required during registration of a Digital Lock enabled application. The binary file for this component is DLKeygen.dll.