Protect intellectual property rights

[tadders]

Hi all,

How can I limit the re-use of LabVIEW components that contain intellectual property rights?

We are looking to design an LVOOP application and our potential customer wants the source code to be delivered.  This would allow the customer to extend the functionality by sub-classing.

We intend to reuse several core components that we have intellectual property rights to and want to limit their use to one named application only.

I can password protect our core VI's, but they could still be used outside the application that we are intending to license and sell.

Is there a way of core VI's interrogating some hiddend attribute of an application to see if it is being used outside of its intended scope?

Perhaps we need to implement our own license server?

Any thoughts or advice gratefully appreciated.

P

[tst]

NI has a licensing and activation toolkit for LV, which is supposed to work in the same way that NI's activation works and might help you. I never used it, so I have no idea how it's actually used in the code, but you can look it up.

[tadders]

Thanks for the tip tst - I'll try contacting NI