Hi,
My company is looking at selling eLearning to customers. As we do not have LMS platform for customers at the moment, we plan to sell it on CD-ROMs. My question is how to protect the CDs for not being copied by the customers to multiple students.

Thanks,
Dana

Hi Dana

You may want to have a look at Atrixware Test Pro Developer, which enables you to apply piracy protection right to your e-learning distribution.

If you have already authored your elearning content, you can either wrap it into the product mentioned above, or, look around for (or code) a piracy protection module (in C# or VB or Java) to do the trick - although that is obviously more technical.

Hope this helps -

You will never keep someone from copying a CD. The only sure way to protect your content is to build in security. Just as Adobe, Microsoft, and others do. This means you will need to have your content encrypted on the CD so that it can only play with your player (program) and this program will not install until it has checked back with your licensing server that the license key has not been used on another computer.

If this all seems difficult, you may want to investigate the cost of implementing an LMS so that you have full control of your courses.

Keep in mind that even with an LMS content can still be copied.

I agree. You're looking for a solution to a problem that many others have thrown millions of $$ at, and still not found a good solution.

Stop looking at it as a problem. Everyone wants fair compensation for their products, but if your content is spread a bit via piracy, that may well lead to even larger sales. Consider it free advertising.

Rely on contracts. Any organization who buys your content should be contractually responsible for the dissemination.

Otherwise, with physical media like a CD, you're looking at a very frustrating issue. Definitely best to go the LMS route where the tracking related to the training is at least tied to one user account. Others may be able to take a user's login and review the training, but they won't get any credit for it...
CM