Create a licensing or expiration date for PLC program?

bill4807 said:

Is it a big legal problem for the programmer or for the company that told the programmer to do so?
Asking for a co-worker.

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Think money-hungry lawyer suing EVERYONE they have a chance of getting $100 out of.


Look at the news this week - Arnold Schwarzenegger's son got in an accident and they are suing Arnold's production company for $1.5 million, and there's no mention that his company owned the car or his son was working for the company at the time of the accident.

I_Automation said:

J

A lot of machines with PC based controls already have licenses - quite a few come with a 30 or 90 day license that needs updated annually, even Visual Studio Community (which is free) has to go online and update its license annually.

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What kind of machines are these, size and what they generally do?


I can imagine a plant being shut down to something going wrong with the license, a date rounding error , or a misunderstanding over "automatic renewal", etc. Lawsuits would be flying allover the place.

kalabdel said:

What kind of machines are these, size and what they generally do?

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One type I frequently have this exact trouble with is exposers for imaging circuit boards.


A customer of mine has 12 of one brand that all when the machine is installed only runs for 30 days, then it shuts down. Each machine is $1/4 million.


Computers on these are replaced at the rate of about 2 per year and hard drives about the same - and those need a license right away, and getting a license from the OEM is a process. A license request file has to be created and sent in, when they get around to it they run that file through their license generator and ship a flash drive with the license through the post office,


Files commonly get corrupted and need reissued also.
Easily this customer has at least one machine down every day of the year for this, and I have seen up to 4 of them down and really effecting their production.


A stamping plant's QC dep't had a very similar issue with a lab machine frequently down for a license issue, and that was the only one of them they had.


EDIT: Years ago I had to work with an inventory system called DataFlex that had a corrupted annual license system. Fortunately that program was the one true victim of Y2K, it could NOT handle the 2 digit year 00 and crashed hard.

The best advice anybody can give you is to contact the best attorney you can and have a good one on one conversation with them on that subject. It is well worth the cost.

To answer your question there could be big legal problems for both the company and the programmer
You as an individual can never get out of the liability if you know you did something wrong
As a programmer if you boss requests you write a trap in the program get it in writing with their signature. Because when it hits fan they will deny having any knowledge of it and hang it all on you.
Some years back I worked a short contract job doing a start up. The full time programmers were bragging to me how they got sued 5 times for doing what we were talking about. The company changed their name each time and moved the operation to a new corporate name to avoid having to pay damages. I am just glad it was a short term contract. I could tell you storied but nobody would believe it anyway.
I have walked away from more than 1 job because of issues like this I will not be part of it.
Just a word of caution as an individual you cannot discharge a judgment against you in bankruptcy
It they want to pursue it even to you estate after death .
It happened to me a client of mine went bankrupt owing me fairly large amount
I did nothing wrong except extend a long time client credit to help them keep the plant running. When they filed bankruptcy in federal court. The court determined that I and other creditors needed to pay their bank part of what my client owed to the bank. In my case it amount was over twice what the client owed me. Others had to pay more. And yes I did contact a lawyer before and after the hearing and nothing I could do the courts protect the banks.

If it is just for renting & there is a time i.e. 12 months then probably fine providing the customer is aware, the other things to consider if if selling a machine then it would be expected to run for at least 7 years (this is the standard time for payback), I would also suggest that there is a grace period, for example if the rental agreement was for 12 months then at least after 11 months there was a message or some form of informing that the machine will expire in xx days etc. in other words the renter is reminded that the license is about to expire.

parky;91778* said:

.... there is a time i.e. 1* months then probably fine providing the customer

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Anyone else here noticing that the forum is automatically editing out every numerical digit that is between 1 and 3 for the past few days?


I have seen TWO, TWELVE, & TWENTY edited so far. [now I wonder if the first spelt word will make it] EDIT: spelling it out seems allowed - also my mention of the Y-TWO-K bug above was edited to Y*K, and earlier a twelve hundred ton press on page 1 of this thread

Yeah, I'm seeing that *

(sorry, I'll see myself out)

Just put a post regarding the * in casual talk, maybe Phil will see it. As it breaks nearly every URL link.

The * issue seems to be OK on my laptop? maybe it's fixrd now.

In TIA Portal you can lock down a project to a specific PLC and memory card by their serial numbers to prevent copying.

I did design a licencing system that operates over the internet for a machine rental scenario but it has never been implemented at machine level.

For one "dodgy" customer in the past, that paid by usage of the equipment, a system was put in place so that the machine would only run at slow speed if it was disconneted from the internet for any lenght of time.

Nick

I saw one with a Zelio where they would ship a new memory module every time you renewed. Company went away and I was replacing with updated controls, but noticed a certain input would hold the license expiration timer in reset. Must've used a jumper wire for the customers not on a subscription.

There was a guy that posted here a while back asking for suggestions on his developing commercial product that did exactly that.

He was nearly run out of town (the forum) for suggesting such a thing.

Manglemender said:

The * issue seems to be OK on my laptop? maybe it's fixrd now.



Nick

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Yep, Phil published a fix just before noon UK time.