Piracy Detection and Prevention using SIFT based on Earth Mover's Distance (EMD)

These days software is not just few lines of code and few number of files, it constitute major part of business logic, and most valuable information. Software is required by all kind of people from individuals to large organizations to carry out important tasks. But it is being pirated on large scale, violating software license and leading to copyright infringement. Almost 50% software licenses are pirated accounting over 51.4 billion dollars loss globally. Piracy is killing many software businesses leading to drastic loss for software developers. Under these circumstances there is a need for anti-piracy methods. This paper discuss about a robust yet efficient method for avoiding software piracy. After introducing software piracy methods and general piracy activities carried out by pirates, a mechanism to validate authorized user using face identity is described. A vector based algorithm is explained which detects Facial features of authorized user and generates a user authentication key, which is used for validation during product activation.