Yes....What Erik has said is totally correct.....so thus you should look at trying to make a way that your software is tightly coupled to the hardware in a way that is difficult to duplicate. For example put a Rainbow Sentinel chip on the board and store some key parameters into it. Without an access algorithm to the Sentenel chip with the proper key the software and/or duplicated hardware would be useless. The Rainbow Sentenel chip is the same device used in PC parallel port software dongles.

Michael Karas