Microsoft Squelches Piracy - Company Business and Marketing

Home Office Computing, June, 2000 by William Van Winkle

YOU'RE A TYPICAL HOME OFFICE WORKER, WITH A DESKTOP PC AND A LAPTOP for the road. You buy the latest version of Microsoft Office 2000 and, like most users, skip the registration process. Imagine your surprise when you launch Office for the 51st time ... and the software stops working. Or perhaps you registered the program on both systems, but months later you upgrade the notebook. Upon completion of this third installation, Office informs you that you're in violation of your license agreement.

This is the work of Microsoft's new Registration Wizard, the latest attempt to stem the $2.9 billion in revenue that software vendors lose each year to piracy (according to the Washington, D.C.-based Business Software Alliance [BSA]). After a two-year test overseas, Registration Wizard made its North American debut in the recent Office 2000 Service Release 1 update.

The wizard examines your system's hardware configuration, then combines its tally with a unique key from your Office CD-ROM to create a 17-character ID that you then must relay to Microsoft. According to International Data Corp. (IDC) analyst Dan Kusnetzsky, the wizard smacks of the alleged invasions of privacy attributed to previous Microsoft products such as Windows 98. "I'm waiting for the lawsuits," he says. "People will say, `I bought this product, I've got a receipt, and now it won't work.'"

In response to charges of Big Brother-ism, Microsoft director of business licensing Jon Magill says there's no way to tie the data gathered by Registration Wizard to a user's identity: "We're not generating a unique identifier. But we can differentiate between the installation on one machine and that of another."

Going After the Little Guy According to a Nathan Associates study commissioned by the BSA, about one in four software programs used in America is an illegal copy. The Registration Wizard targets individual users, whom Microsoft says are responsible for about 75 percent of "casual" pirating, in which users pass around copied discs or make illegal installations.

Microsoft's license agreement allows you to install one copy of Office 2000 on two different computers (or on one PC with a dual-boot system). Additional installation attempts trigger a prompt to contact Microsoft support. However, there is some latitude, Magill explains. "When a user comes in with a rare installation frequency, we assume he's upgraded his machine and is transferring the license. We've trained our support reps to recognize this"

On the Docket While Microsoft has filed more than 200 civil suits against resellers this past year, it's yet to take legal action against an individual. But the BSA, which represents vendors like Adobe and Corel, as well as Microsoft, has sued 25 California users for allegedly exchanging pirated software online. Local police have prosecuted others, such as David Pugh of Atlantic Beach, Fla., who received a 30-month jail sentence for selling pirated software on the Web.

Of course, if you dislike Registration Wizard, you're free to vote with your dollars by buying Corel's WordPerfect 2000--or to vote with no dollars by trying Sun's free StarOffice suite. Neither requires registration.