Symantec will add digital-rights-management technology to its entire 2004 consumer product line, requiring customers to activate products such as Norton Antivirus 2004. In April, Symantec said it had added an undisclosed DRM software package to selected versions of Norton Antivirus 2003, which the company termed a "pilot" program at the time. Now, the company said it will apply the activation technology across all of its consumer product lines, including the Norton Antivirus 2004 package Symantec announced earlier this week. "The reason we're doing product activation is that there is a huge amount of piracy in Symantec products," said Phil Weiler, a spokesman for Symantec. "Companies are offering pirated versions of our security products to protect (users') computers and the pirated versions don't provide protection the consumers think they're getting."

To date, Symantec has not disclosed what DRM technology the company has used, but executives have said the software does not write data to the boot sector, as Macrovision's SafeCast technology does. Companies like Macromedia, on the other hand, have also included DRM software in their products but have taken pains to disclose the DRM software used and to detail the activation process to the user in advance. Members of the Business Software Alliance have said that DRM is an inevitable part of the future of selling software, according to Macromedia executives. At Symantec, that attitude has apparently taken firm root. Source: ExtremeTech