<OT> MS moves to mandatory registration
By Lisa M. Bowman, ZDNN
February 10, 2000 7:15 AM PT
URL: zdnet.com
New users of Office 2000 will get a taste of Microsoft Corp.?s latest anti-piracy measure: forced registration.
The company is inserting a new feature into an upcoming release of its word processing software that will cause the product to malfunction if a person doesn?t register after launching it 50 times. Users of volume licenses, such as those working at big companies, won?t have to register.
The so-called Registration Wizard doesn?t require users to give any more information than their country of origin, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said. And they can register anonymously through fax, phone, e-mail or snail mail.
The company clashed with privacy experts over Office 97 last spring, when it was discovered that some Word and Excel documents contained code numbers that could identify the source of the document. Microsoft quickly issued a patch and now says Office 2000 documents will not have a similar identifier.
The Registration Wizard has been part of a two-year-long pilot program, which was designed as an aggressive move to combat software piracy.
?Counterfeiting is a big problem. What makes it even more difficult is the Internet,? said Jackie Carriker, who works on Microsoft?s anti-piracy efforts.
The Web makes it easy for pirates to buy and sell software, sometimes to unsuspecting consumers. In January, the company succeeded in taking down 100 sites that distributed counterfeit copies of Windows 2000, a product that isn?t scheduled to launch until next week. The number of counterfeit distribution sites has grown to 2 million in 1999 from 100,000 in 1997, according to industry trade groups.
Microsoft also is adding new anti-piracy features to Windows 2000, including a hologram that covers the entire CD-ROM and a new certificate of authenticity. |
