Microsoft to discourage use of pirated software in partnership with State Attorneys General
Microsoft Pursues New Tack on Piracy — Software Maker Forges Alliances With State Attorneys General — Long frustrated in efforts to collect payments from some users of its software in China …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's piracy fight has run through two phases already in this corpus: an evolving corporate playbook described back in its December 2007 anti-piracy strategy update, and technical enforcement built into the product itself, as when antipiracy checks were tuned for Windows 7 in May 2009. The rhetorical peak came in January 2011, when Ballmer told Hu Jintao's visiting delegation that roughly 90% of Microsoft customers in China were using pirated software — frustration the company has never converted into payments.
This story adds the missing third leg: state power. Rather than only shipping activation technology or lobbying Beijing, Microsoft is forging confirmed alliances with US State Attorneys General to discourage unlicensed use, effectively renting law-enforcement legitimacy for its compliance push. Notably, the move lands in the same month Microsoft is giving software away elsewhere — free OneNote for Mac, a freemium Windows client, and a cloud API, with an Office for iPad unveiling planned — tightening legal enforcement even as it loosens product distribution.
First-order effects
- Businesses and institutions running unlicensed Microsoft software in states whose attorneys general join the program now face compliance pressure backed by legal authority, not just vendor audits.
- The attorneys general get a ready-made enforcement agenda against commercial-scale software counterfeiting without building their own detection capability, since Microsoft supplies both the evidence and the target list.
Second-order effects
- PC resellers and system builders are pushed harder toward certifying genuine Windows installs, because their customers become the visible enforcement surface while they carry the liability.
- Cost-sensitive buyers who balk at genuine-license pricing have a clearer substitute path — open-source office suites and operating systems — so every enforcement win risks converting marginal users rather than paying ones.
Third-order effects
- If the attorney-general model proves out domestically, it hands Microsoft a template for pursuing the China problem through bilateral and trade channels instead of waiting for local courts, shifting antipiracy from a technical cat-and-mouse game to an institutional one.
- A pattern of vendors allying directly with government enforcement bodies would raise the compliance bar industry-wide and invite scrutiny of how much policing power private copyright holders should wield through public offices.
The trend: Software antipiracy is migrating from in-product technical locks toward alliances with government enforcement authority, with vendors supplying the detection and public offices supplying the sanction.