The scheme by which Autodesk flags a drawing as educational is so amateurish it can be cracked in under 20 minutes, a couple mintues if you know what to look for. I did it for the technical challenge, nothing more (the discussion that originally appeared on Autodesk's news server in which I had noted my finding has been nuked, tho I didn't share the actual details -- merely that it was laughable how easy it was to crack).
Having said that should one disclose the details of the scheme?
ABSOLUTELY NOT IMO.
Should one distribute drawings made or modified by an educational version, even if for non commercial purposes?
ABSOLUTELY NOT; NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES IMO2.
A tool for scanning drawings for the 'educational' state is available by the very competent Owen Wengerd, at manusoft.com (
EDU-Scan). Applicable for AutoCAD 2000/2002.
<snip>Features
The EDU-Scan interface is very simple. A small icon in the AutoCAD status bar with the letters "EP" indicates the status of the current drawing. When the current drawing is infected with the educational product plot stamp, the letters EP appear in red; otherwise the letters are greyed out. Right clicking on the button opens a context menu with options for an 'About' dialog.
There is no graphical user interface for configurable settings in EDU-Scan, however there are several AutoCAD profile settings that may be used to change the default EDU-Scan behavior. Administrators may use these configuration settings to enforce use of EDU-Scan throughout an organization, or to modify it's default behavior.
For programmers, EDU-Scan defines an AutoLISP function named (IsEMR). This function returns T if the current drawing contains the educational product plot stamp, or nil otherwise. </snip>
No affiliation, though I did briefly discuss Autodesk's scheme with Owen once upon a lifetime ago.
We now return you to regularly scheduled discussions.
PEACE.