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The tag was first used on November 14, 2011. Despite being around this long, it's only got twelve questions, of which two have negative vote counts.

Perhaps one could say that license keys are a niche subgroup of signature-like things and whitebox cryptography, but it seems to be a honey trap if anything: By having it, we encourage people to ask low-research questions. A “license key” is not a concept in cryptography and while doing research on ways to get there, you inevitably stumble across the cryptographic methods to get to a possible solution.

There's room for saying that at least it acts as a containment tag of sorts, but it also seems to overlap with to me, which itself only has seven questions. The tag is a superset that includes the tag, which frees both the answers from having to strictly stick to license keys, and encourages questions to explore alternative venues of (possibly more effective) copy protection methods.

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  • $\begingroup$ Very well, it appears that this question has gathered more than enough votes for our standard thresholds (which are +6 difference between the options) and so I just merged license-key into copy-protection and created a synonym. $\endgroup$
    – SEJPM Mod
    Commented Sep 21, 2020 at 9:32

2 Answers 2

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No, we do not need this tag.

  • It is specific to a use case and doesn't indicate any particular kind of cryptography.
  • Copy protection is narrow enough for so few questions.
  • (reasons filled by the community)
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Yes, we need this tag.

  • (reasons filled by the community)
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