Attention all you pirates, put your parrots on alert for the cops and stash your piece of eight FAST. The Federation Against Software Theft is out to get you.

The second reading of a Bill giving the police powers to combat software pirates is due on Friday, February 22. And, with the support being given to it by that bunch of do-gooders in Westminster, it will no doubt get passed.

Whether it will do any good or not is open to debate, since even faced with the power to raid their pirating dens, the swashbuckling latter-day corsairs of the computer industry will probably not be bothered - they'll just be a little more circumspect and professional.

In addition, most commercial software these days is sufficiently uncopiable to deter all except the most case-hardened hacker.

FAST's chairman, Donald MacLean (not the American Pi-man) has siad in the past that home piracy is not really the problem: the real menaces are the professional commercial pirates who copy software and mass market it under the same label, at a cheaper price.

The FAST solution to this problem is not to use a standard locking technique, although at the same time it publicises standard techniques either under development, or currently available.

One system that keeps rearing its attractive head is the use of a dongle (whether purposefully, or accidentally). This is a piece of hardware that plugs into the micro and whose presence is checked for by the software. If it is not present, then crunch.

The problem is that it tends to add quite a lot to the cost of the software, possibly more than is being lost through pirating.

Other slightly more subtle methods include putting duff tracks or ID codes on the disk where they cannot be copied but can be read, if you know where to look. If they are not found, some systems die, while others perform the neat trick of running for a while and then slowing down, eventually grinding to a halt with a nasty message.

There is an argument that protection on commercial software causes more problems to the user than it solves. Micropro has recently announced that it has dropped the protection on Wordstar 2000 due to the problems that occur when installing it on a number of PC compatibles.

As software becomes more and more sophisticated, so does the protection needed to stop the pirates. Unfortunately, as the software gets better, then so do the freebooters.

This does serve the possibly useful purpose of making programmers who pirate software better programmers. For instance, there is the story about one software company which trains its programmers by forcing them to crack protection before they are allowed to write any commerical software.

A quick review of the general methods of copying seems to indicate that as the industry comes out of its infancy, the software gets better and more expensive, hence the need for protection becomes greater. For commercial systems, the corrupt track and hidden code number methods are currently the most popular.

Cassette software poses a few more problems since the easiest way of copying is with a dual drive 'Ghetto blaster'. In the past, the two methods of trying to beat this have been to make the tape a non-standard length and to alter the volume level on the original to the critical point where the copy's volume is too low.

Another favourite method is to include a colour-coded chart with the software. After the program is loaded, it asks for the colour at a certain point on the chart. If you get it wrong then the program clears itself from memory.

If and when FAST gets the court backing it needs, it will only be able to attack commercial pirates. Home copying will remain with us for good. And as with the home copying of records on to tape, there is really no way to enforce any laws, no matter what the penalties may be.

The upshot of all this is that software freebooters will be around as long as there is fun and booty to be had from pirating and FAST may be wasting its time since it'll never touch home copying and commercial software is already pretty well uncopiable.