ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,259,953, issued on March 25, was assigned to EMC IP Holding Co. LLC (Hopkinton, Mass.).

"Framework for preventing software piracy in virtual machines (VMs) by using virtual hardware encryption verification" was invented by Parminder Singh Sethi (Punjab, India) and Durai S. Singh (Chennai, India).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "One example method includes receiving, from a VM, a request for a software license, in response to the request, transmitting a UUID to the VM, receiving, from the VM, a response that comprises a first encrypted UUID corresponding to the request, and transmitting a client object that includes the first encrypted UUID...