Is there any software out there (free or not) that will allow me to burn a CD of images and have the images or the CD itself expire after a period of time.

Thanks in advance for your replies!!

... Is there really nothing out there?

Not really. The most notable attempt to have expiring discs was Circuit City's divx fiasco. That didn't work too well.

Any software based system is always vulnerable to cracking. In the old days, people could just change the system clock to get around time-expiring software. The techniques may have changed but the principles are the same.

Generally speaking, it's just too much work to do that. About the only way you can do it (that I can think of off-hand) is to have a program that will "phone home" and verify whether a key stored in the image or disc is valid, based on a date.

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even if i had something not-so-good.... i'm not really too worried about people trying to hack into it after its expired.. just as long as it does expire would be better than nothing at all. do you know of anything that will do that?

I'm not aware of anything that will work w/ CDs directly. Unless you are talking about program that is installed off the CD, trying to expire a CD itself is nearly impossible.

The only other thing I can think of is the various DRM companies out there, such as Macrovision and SecuROM. They may have something like you're looking for, but I'm sure the cost is very large since they cater to big media. And you don't want excessive DRM because that just pisses people off.

My recommendation is to find a different business model that doesn't rely on expiring CDs.

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Start Programming with Python-A beginner's guide to programming and the Python language.
-------------
Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.