[rand0mn00b]

I'm afraid it's not as easy as just copying the contents of someone else's SD card on to your's...

With everyone owning a computer and the widespread use of forums like these combined with the ease and low cost in which SD cards can be purchased, GPS mapping companies have had to step up the measures to prevent map piracy. While the cost of GPS hardware is continually dropping, map software is still making these companies relatively good money, especially in comparison to the cost of producing and shipping hardware.

I work in technical services for a company that distributes after market car head units and we recently released a line of head units under our own house brand that include GPS mapping. We too thought it was a case of just copying some files to a thousand SD cards using a card duplicator. Boy were we wrong... I basically had to do crash course on GPS mapping production to meet the demands of our sales department.

Obviously specifics in the implementation will differ between mapping software providers, but after being involved in the production of 1000+ GPS microSD cards, I hope I can shed some light on the general steps involved through my experience:

each SD card or microSD in our case has a unique number embedded into its hardware. This number needs to be obtained for each card so that it can be entered into a licensing software that generates and embeds a license that will only work for that 1 card with that unique identifier number. In other words, you can have 2 completely legit licenses with legit map software and cards but if the identifier numbers don't all match up it will not work.

This licensing software is obviously only supplied to authorised OEMs or suppliers such as ours. The license for this licensing software is highly secure involving encrypted certificates and each time a license or a batch of licenses is generated it contacts a central authentication server on the mapping company's end to authorise the generation of the licenses. This allows them to keep count of how many licenses we are generating so that they can bill us accordingly. These requests must also only come from a computer IP address approved by the central server.

So... after all that is said and done. There is 1 solution that may work and it is a big maybe. That is for all you owners of legit cards, albeit out of date - your SD cards will probably have a license file in there somewhere. That license file will ONLY work with that SD card. So what you may be able to do, is try to locate that license file and make a copy of it (and the entire contents of the card too for good measure). Then, if you are able to get a complete copy of the latest, up to date maps, copy them all on to your existing SD card over-writing the old maps. Then copy your original license back on to the card.

If the license has been obfuscated or otherwise embedded into a part of the SD card that cannot be read by a regular card reader and computer you are SOL. I'm sure someone somewhere with lots of time, resources and computer wizardy could manage it if he wanted but it would be a very difficult task for something you may be able to get free...