Microcosm takes your privacy very seriously.

To combat software piracy, the developer of the software product you are using has chosen to use our CopyMinder protection system. This ensures that they get paid for their software but with much less inconvenience to their legitimate customers (you) than older copy protection systems.

CopyMinder is able to achieve this by occasional access to the CopyMinder web site.

Your privacy is of paramount importance to us partly because that is the correct and moral way for companies to behave but also because it is essential to our survival. If we did not respect your privacy, word would soon get out and we would not be able to sell our system to Software Developers. Without your confidence in us, we would be in difficulty. Consequently, we are totally open about the information that is sent to us from your machine:

The data sent to us from your machine falls into two categories:

• Registration Data

  The Software Developer may have requested certain information from you (such as name, address etc.) when you first installed the software. Some items may have been flagged as being required items, i.e. items of information that the Software Developer insists on receiving before allowing you to use the software. Other items are optional. This Registration information is sent to the CopyMinder web site and can only be accessed by the Software Developer and Microcosm. Microcosm will never divulge this information to anybody else (unless required to do so by law) or use it themselves for any purpose whatsoever. You will not receive any email or unsolicited communication from Microcosm. We hate Spam as much as the next person.

• Protection Data

  We send a small amount of data from your machine to the CopyMinder web site to enable us to check its legality. It will typically look like this:

  Language=0&DID=C&ProductKey=ABC-DEFG-HIJK-LM&ProgName=spcalc.exe&Version=2
  &UpdateNum=41783536&Time=1082471534&Execs=0&Cause=0&Mx=0c44931

  The information is solely concerned with the protection of the software you have purchased. It will not tell us anything else about you or what software or data is on your machine.

Openness

We want to be as open as possible about what data is sent to us so we have included an option to log every item of data sent to us. By default, this option is enabled but you can stop the logging if you wish (see www.copyminder.com/logging.php).  The log file is called ProgramName.cm.log (for example, c:\Program Files\Acme Software\Program1.exe.cm.log). Notice that it is not encrypted so that you can see exactly what we are sending.

A 2 way process

Of course, we also send data to your machine in response to the data sent to us. We will never send data to your machine other than in direct response to your protected program sending information to us.

Usually, this data is quite small consisting of some un-encrypted data (error codes etc.) and an encrypted block of data. The encrypted data contains authorisation to your program to continue running. Occasionally, there will be a larger download of data to your machine. This will occur when we have a newer, better version of the CopyMinder file (ProgramName.cm). CopyMinder can update itself so that any problems can be quickly resolved automatically.

Microcosm does not put any 'Cookies', 'Web Beacons', advertisements or 'Pop-Ups' on your machine.

Comments/Complaints

If you have any questions or complaints relating to privacy with CopyMinder, please address them to privacy@copyminder.com