Microsoft warns of the piracy blues
Microsoft is warning online auction users to watch out for a bogus marketing scheme used by software pirates. The offenders are offering counterfeit copies of Windows and Office under the ‘Blue Edition’ name.
Fortunately this doesn’t mean the Office Assistant paperclip performs a strip tease before offering to lend you a hand. Instead it’s supposedly a Microsoft marketing program for which the firm produced too many CDs, which the auction sellers are now disposing of on the cheap.
This is completely false and Microsoft has launched 63 separate legal actions against sellers in a dozen countries as far afield as Japan and the Dominican Republic. It’s pointing customers to its anti-counterfeiting site if they have any concerns.
EBay is working with Microsoft to find and remove bogus listings. The software giant says it doesn’t hold the auction house responsible, saying simply “We hold the pirates responsible for piracy”.
While some customers have complained about being conned by the ads, it seems hard to believe there aren’t buyers who’ve known they were getting shady goods. If the low prices weren’t a giveaway, the fact that some sellers claimed the Blue Edition doesn’t need activation, a serial number or a license, should have raised suspicion.
Whatever your views on the pricing of Windows and its value for money, running a pirated operating system seems pretty dumb for me. It’s one thing taking a risk that bogus software might crash or stop working at any time, or even be carrying viruses. But it’s quite another to put the entire basis of your computer use in something that has far less guarantee of stability or performance than even the worst official edition of Windows.
That said, if someone does decide to run a bogus copy of Windows, it’s even more baffling that they’d actually feel the need to pay for it in this peer-to-peer filesharing age.
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