How to avoid data piracy?

Best way is to use a library to archive those files, then encrypt/decrypt the data to deter anyone trying to take out the files. Note that for the most part, this will make it hard to obtain the files, but doesn't make it impossible. It's not that hard to write your own custom solution. I wrote something called Simple Archive, that does pretty much this. Feel free to take a look at it. For a quick overview on it look at the temporary webpage for it here. It comes with examples of how to use as well as the source so you can take a look at how I went about it.

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Original post by Drew_Benton Best way is to use a library to archive those files, then encrypt/decrypt the data to deter anyone trying to take out the files. Note that for the most part, this will make it hard to obtain the files, but doesn't make it impossible. It's not that hard to write your own custom solution. I wrote something called Simple Archive, that does pretty much this. Feel free to take a look at it. For a quick overview on it look at the temporary webpage for it here. It comes with examples of how to use as well as the source so you can take a look at how I went about it.

This seems to be the industry-standard approach to the problem, simply because it works quite well (and it keeps the number of files down, too). For example, Valve's Steam architecture operates on such a system. The archive files are encrypted, and then uncompressed and decrypted at loadtime.

If you really want to protect your data, and put in the time to implement a fairly extensive filesystem, I recommend this approach.