>Does anyone know of a good way to implement copy protection into a VFP 5 App?
>
>Thanks,
>Ian.

A way that has become more feasable with the reduced price of CD-R drives is to burn a custom CD with particular bits of data on it. In your app you could check for the existance of the CD and get a checksum for the data. This would protect your app in two ways: 1) The client couldn't install extra copies at his site. 2) The client couldn't give copies to his friends.

Of course, tech-literate client could dupe the CD or certain software to get around it, but for the most part you would be safe.

Another, less flexible option would to do a per-machine install. In this scenario you would need to do some low-level checking for stuff like CPU serial number or bios number, etc. You could either hard-code valid id's or store them in a table. Of course, if the client were ever to upgrade their machine or switch machines altogether the software would stop working.