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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Charles Arthur

Windows Genuine Advantage: it only gets more confusing

Microsoft wasn't able to respond to us on Tuesday, when this week's copy of Technology Guardian went to press (yes, such an old-fashioned idea, but it makes money) to comment for our story about Windows Genuine Advantage - you know, that program that checks whether a copy of Windows is "genuine". The latter phrase, of course, raises all sort of epistemological questions. As we'll see.

But here's the response we did get (later) from Michala Alexander, Head of Anti-Piracy, Microsoft UK. You'll recall that the story pointed out that an official Microsoft response in the US said that 80% of WGA failures were due to pirated volume keys. In which case, we asked, what's going on with the other 20%?

Ms Alexander responds (and the things that I find intriguing I've marked with (numbers) and discuss further down):

"Using a stolen volume licensing key has been one well known method of counterfeiting Windows XP. This accounts for around 80% of the non-genuine users today. The other 20% represents other types of counterfeit, including forms of tampering and unauthorized OEM installations. Of the hundreds of millions of WGA validations to date, only a handful was actual false positives. Most of these were due to data entry errors that were quickly corrected.
"Often times, users have no idea that their copy of Windows is counterfeit. The most common situation is what we call the "repair shop" scenario. In this scenario, a genuine Windows user takes their PC to be repaired. Unbeknownst to the customer, the repair shop installs an unlicensed copy of Windows. ( 1) The customer has no idea that this happened. In this situation, Microsoft provides a failure report that the customer can print and go back to the repair shop to resolve this issue. This scenario is also common when a PC is set up or repaired by friends or family members, who install their own copy of Windows on someone else's machine.( 2) While the intentions are often innocent, this is in fact a form of software piracy.
"Another very common scenario is someone who buys a new PC from a dishonest business which charges them for the software but installs a pirated copy. The user knows they have paid for their copy of Windows, but they are actually running pirated software. When WGA alerts them to the use of counterfeit software, the user might feel confused or think the WGA test is inaccurate (a false positive) when, in fact, they have been taken advantage of by the business from which they acquired the counterfeit copy. Microsoft is working hard to educate customers to insist upon genuine Windows.( 3) We are also working with our legal and investigative teams to help identify and take legal action against channel partners who sell counterfeit and pirated Windows in order to level the playing field for our honest partners.
"Additionally, customers who believe they have been victimized by software piracy can submit their counterfeit copy of Windows to Microsoft for evaluation and may be eligible for a complimentary replacement.( 4)"


So, the intriguing stuff.

(1): Unlicensed in what way? The repair shop has a copy of Windows. The customer has a copy of Windows. (OK, they might not be precisely the same category - eg XP Pro vs XP Home, but you'd think a "repair shop" would be careful to spot the difference.) If the repair shop isn't licensed to install Windows.. the fact remains that you still have the same number of copies in circulation. Microsoft hasn't lost any revenue in this "transaction", because the repair shop hasn't put a copy of Windows where there wasn't one before. Piracy implications: zero. (Unless, as mentioned above, the repair shop "upgrades" the Windows on the being-repaired PC.)

(2) A PC is set up or repaired by a family member, and the repairer puts their own copy of Windows on it. Again, if you allow that the copy of Windows being installed is legit, where's the piracy issue in the "repair" scenario? We'd imagine the number of self-built PCs which get a reused copy of Windows put on is unimaginably small. Piracy implications: orders of magnitude smaller than the daily interest on Microsoft's bank deposit of $33.5bn.

(3) How does one "insist" upon genuine Windows in this situation? Many shops sell you the PC and the Windows disk (or reinstall disk) is somewhere in all the box and malarkey. If you're buying online, how on earth could you tell? Some notable very large online suppliers don't even give you a "clean" Windows box; all you get is system reinstall disks. Those are legit, but how could you know?

(4) Under what circumstances precisely is one eligible for a free replacement of a counterfeit copy? What receipts etc would you need? And while the copy of Windows is being considered by Microsoft, what are you meant to do if you need to do a system reinstall or "prove" that you have a valid copy of Windows, etc?

We've forwarded a link to this post on to Microsoft for more comment. From here, WGA seems increasingly like a subversive tool to expose just how confusing the Windows licensing scheme can be.

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