Could piracy be a thing of the past with Microsoft leading a new attack on an old problem?

Piracy has been a thorn in the flesh of the software industry for years. According to a report published by the Business Software Alliance, a leading software industry forum, 35 percent of all software worth around $35 billion, installed worldwide during 2005 was pirated or unlicensed.

Many computer users aged 30 or older will remember cheerfully duplicating cassette software for their Commorodore 64s in the mid 1980s, and then disk-to-disk copying Amiga and PC software in the later half of the 1980s . I even remember seeing ads for pirate software in the local paper ($5 per disk); the concept of software piracy was so new that the police didn’t realise it was illegal to sell copies of programs.

The rise of the Internet has facilitated a new era of on-demand piracy. If you know where to look, you can download almost any title you can think of through the Internet.

Microsoft’s Software Protection Platform is now aggressively attacking the piracy problem on two fronts:

The first part involves activation, and this has been around for years. After you install the software, it needs to be activated either over the Internet, or over phone, for it work correctly. If it’s not activated, the software enters into a reduced functionality mode. This means, for example, that many commands are unavailable and that you cannot create new documents or save them, though you can print them. Interestingly, volume users of Office 2007 will be excempt from

The second part of the strategy involves the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and Office Genunine Advantage (OGA) initiatives. What this means is that your software will only be able to download and install updates if it’s genuine (it does a check online before you start the update). So even if you’ve got a cracked Windows or Office, when it comes to needing to install an update (say to fix a security problem), you won’t be able to so.

It’s ironic that while it was Internet that facilitated the rise of on-demand piracy, it’s also the Internet that is allowing companies to activate and validate their software products. With other companies developing anti-piracy measures similar to Microsoft’s, it may be just a matter of time before piracy as we have known it becomes a thing of the past.

Hopefully, what this will mean is that open source software will become more popular as an alternative to commercial products. WIth great open source programs already available as alternatives for many commercial programs, this may not be as far fetched as it sounds.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 10:06 pm under Microsoft, Open source, Opinion, Vista.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
Stumble It!