Microsoft Intensifies Anti-Piracy Measures

Your computer screen’s menus and icons disappear, slipping beneath a wall of funereal black. The computer still works, but it will not work for you.

While it may sound like a nightmare scenario, it’s exactly the situation businesses and consumers using pirated copies of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system may find themselves in, as Microsoft has now activated Vista’s “reduced functionality mode.”

As many as one in three computer users in the Czech Republic use pirated copies of Microsoft Windows, according to industry data. The average piracy rate in the country runs at about 39 percent, a notch above the global average, the Business Software Alliance estimates. The United States has the world’s lowest piracy rate, at 21 percent.

In Vista, the reduced functionality mode will take effect if the operating system has not been correctly activated by entering a license key, following a 30-day grace period.

“Vista includes a sophisticated tool to detect illegal copies. The check is carried out in the background and would go unnoticed by registered users,” said Tomáš Koška, who heads the Windows client section at Microsoft ?R.

The new Vista control measures will likely pressure both businesses and home users into buying legal copies of Windows.

Source: The Praque Post

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