Actionscript Viewer is most definetley the most popular and most feared SWF decompiler and it causes alot of debates in the community, on the subject of keeping your precious actionscript code away from prying eyes. One such debate is currently underway on the flashcoders mailing list. To solve this problem once and for all, i have two suggestions that i hope Burak Kalayci will consider implementing into the next major release of his tool.
Solution One:
Flash authors pay a subscription - $xX per year, subscriptions are made via the products website. Pay with your credit card and you recieve a unique license number. Paste this license number in any flash movie that you want to protect from the decompiler. When somebody attempts to decompile your flash movie, the tool checks to see if a license number exists, if one does, then the tool talks to its central server and checks to see if the license is valid (ie. not expired), if the license number is valid, then the flash movie will not be decompiled.
This solution will produce further revenue for Burak Kalayci and also solve all our problems (all be it we would have to pay, but whats $xx per year for a small-medium sized company? nada, and *generally* it is the corporates who are worried about their intellectual property rights etc…)
Solution Two:
Flash authors include an MD5 hash in their flash movies, the hash code is generated from two strings, one which only Burak Kalayci knows (A - Salt) and another which the user enters (B - Password). The hash is generated from a simple web form and a server-side script on the products website. When somebody attempts to decompile a flash movie containing an MD5 hash, the user is prompted to enter their password (B - Password). The decompiler itself knows (A - Salt) and thus computes an MD5 hash using the two strings, as it did in the server-side script. If the generated hash matches the one in the Flash Movie, then the user has entered the correct password and the Flash Movie is decompiled.
This solution in particular eliminates the argument, that the company produces a product the both has a legitimate use and an illegimiate use, as their is a solution to solve the problem of unlawful usage and the responsibility then lies in the flash authors hands to password protect their files.
Obviously, the main issue with implementing this functionality into Actionscript Viewer, is that this is not the only tool that can decompile a Flash Movie, and the other competitors will use this new funtionality as their marketing edge, by not implementing the functionality. Maybe, we should just accept that our actionscript isnt safe and take people to court over unlawful usage of the various SWF Decompilers to rip our code.