Microsoft Takes Aim at Piracy and Outlines Windows 7 Anti-Piracy Experience

Microsoft has focused its anti-piracy efforts on protecting customers and partners from the evolving risks of counterfeit software and increasingly sophisticated piracy scams. Every day, more than one million users activate and validate their PCs to make sure they’re running genuine Windows software, and Microsoft has made significant investments in customer education and engineering efforts to make this process simple, easy and reliable. For customers who do discover they are piracy victims, Microsoft has made a range of options available to them, including buying online or through retail, often at special pricing or even at no cost.

Joe Williams, general manager, Worldwide Genuine Windows at Microsoft says:

The customer’s experience of product activation and validation in Windows 7 are built off of our Software Protection Platform that we introduced with Windows Vista. We had two primary goals: first, to enable Windows to protect itself by detecting when attempts have been made to circumvent or tamper with the built-in product activation technology; and second, to improve the experience of activating by focusing on enabling the customer to activate the product easily and, when necessary, to understand and resolve any issues they might face.

Overall the technology we designed for Windows Vista allows Windows to better protect itself and be updated over time. As a result, Windows Vista is harder to pirate, and we’re seeing fewer copies of non-genuine Windows Vista on customers’ machines. Windows 7 includes the latest generation of this technology and provides the technical foundation of our ongoing anti-piracy efforts.

While we have seen success with our implementation in Windows Vista, as evident from the lower levels of piracy, we also knew we could do better in Windows 7. For example, with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, if a PC was not activated during the login process, customers would periodically see a dialog box as a visual reminder they still needed to activate their copy of Windows. Within this prompt, they could choose to activate immediately or later. But the option to push the “activate later” button was grayed out for 15 seconds. Customers told us that while the prompt grabbed their attention, they didn’t understand why they needed to activate immediately and that the delay was annoying. In Windows 7 we modified this process: When customers choose to activate later they will see a dialog box highlighting how activation helps them identify if their copy of Windows is genuine and be allowed to proceed immediately without a 15-second delay. In Windows 7 we’ve made changes so that users will see more informative notifications messages and be able to more easily complete the tasks they need to.

We also spent time thinking about how we could make activation and validation easier for enterprises. For example, we think IT professionals will appreciate support in Windows 7 for virtualized images and volume activation technologies. When Windows Vista was being developed, virtualization was primarily a server scenario, but today many companies have it in their production environment on both the server and the client. We listened and adapted our management tool for organizations by making them more easily available. When customers see and use the tools we’re providing to support Windows Vista and Windows 7 deployments, we think they will be impressed.