Windows XP in piracy shocker

THE WINDOWS GENUINE ADVANTAGE scheme has now been running for two and a half years. It aims to spot illicit copies of Microsoft products and offer the guilty parties the chance to come clean and cough up the readies for the real thing.

So far, reports Information Weak, over 20 per cent of the 512 million computers that phoned home were found to be running dodgy software - that's 114 million users, folks.

Of those 114 million, a paltry 56,000 filed a counterfeit report, entitling them to a reduced price, or, in some cases, free genuine copy of Windows. However, WGA isn't foolproof, and Microsoft estimates that half a percent, or 571,000 people have been falsely identified as running a hooky version of XP.

Indeed, only yesterday, I joined the other 570,999 of these innocent victims when one of my XP machines threw a wobbler and decided that not only had it not been activated, but that it was running a crooked version of the OS. Luckily a stern talking to using unparliamentary language, followed by a reboot showed it the error of its ways and it is now running happily again.

I have no sympathy with the criminal underclass who consider any company with more money than them to be fair game for theft, be they record companies, film studios, TV stations or software providers. These people are no better than muggers grabbing an iPod that some other poor soul has worked hard to pay for.

So I absolutely agree that Microsoft has every right to insist that it only offers support and updates to people who have actually paid for its products, but I can't help but feel that it could have been better implemented. Software piracy will never be completely eradicated and inconveniencing the innocent rather than punishing the guilty seems to be rather arse about face, as my old granny always liked to say.

Rather than bundling the cost of support and upgrades into the product, why not sell it at a knock-down price with three months-worth of upgrades and then charge for ongoing support on a kind of extended warranty basis?

It seems to work for other software producers, car manufacturers and electronics companies. And another thing occured to me while reading about the 0.5% error rate of WGA - if it wrongly reports 571,000 XP installations as bogus, surely the probability is that 571,000 of the systems reported as law-abiding are, in fact, running software obtained from a bloke down the pub? µ