http://www.physorg.com/news71495917.html

First off losses to piracy loss have to be take with a grain of salt, (or just realize they are probably pure b.s.) since they are written by the people who are trying to explain why profits aren"t as high as they could have been, lets face they have every reason to inflate these figures, and no reason to give it a second thought, not to mention that these numbers essentially appear out of thin air, and added to that are faulty assumptions, like every pirated copy equals a lost sell since many software pirates would choose to live without the software rather than to have to pay for it.

But the more important point is that microsoft is stealing people computing resources, although the resources may be minute, they are still using up resources that they had no right to. And are they ever going to compensate us for running this little process that only benifits MS? since WGA is supposedly going to curb $34 Billion in losses, shouldn"t they pass the saving to consumers since the majority of the work was done on our computers, which WE paid for, NOT microsoft. - see those suposedly tiny ammount of resources, add up to billion in saving to microsoft (and if not why are they even doing this) and who sees the saving, the great monopoly. but honestly the person who came up with the scheme should have a harvard case study done on them since it is genius.

I go to a University, pirated software is common at universities. It personally disheartens me because many of these students are studying to go into the business world and are hurting their chances of finding a job. Anyone who says it isn't a problem should take look around developing countries and people living in industrialized nations who want the latest software but don't want to or can't pay for it.

It is a companies right to do this and actually their legal responsibility to enforce its policies. If a company wants to pursue legal action against pirates they have to show a track record of actively seeking out and putting down unlicensed use of their software.

If you don't want to give up "computing resources" use another OS. Mac OS offers all key programs, Linux is a viable substitute. On my PC the only Microsoft software is the operating system, I deleted everything else. I use OpenOffice and non-Microsoft media players.

If someone doesn't like the way Microsoft does things they don't have to use it, and they definitely shouldn't steal it. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly because of some monopoly on technology or any shady business practices, they have a legal monopoly because 95% of computer users buy into Microsoft and PC Manufacturers marketing. (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2)

I agree that ideally people should use alternatives to Microsoft products if they don't believe there's enough value to them, but there's a larger issue going on that's coercively removed many alternatives to the market. Microsoft has, to a large extent, a government granted monopoly because people aren't free to compete - capitalism is suppose to include free markets and the ideas of intellectual property rights has perverted this.

Here's an example of one area in which this monopoly is enforced, not by customers selecting preferred products in a free market but by police and select groups of people legally defining what products people can buy from who - let's say some people are developing a new sorting engine for a filesystem, whoever completes this and gets a patent is now legally the sole owner of that technology despite the fact that others were likely pursuing similar lines and that even if noone else had been pursuing it at the time, someone else prior to this had the ability to develop it for their need in a similar fashion as the person who got the patent. I agree it's at least immoral to copy someone else work and use it to compete against them in a limited market but that's now the way the system works.

So basically, one person can create something and get a patent that denies everyone else, forcibly, from being able to pursue similar lines, and in many cases there isn't just one person working on an idea but many people moving in parallel with technology that also have an interest in the same technology. For example, the Wright Brothers didn't invent airplanes - they just happened to be the first people around when the technology came around to finally be able to add a lightweight source of enough power to get one off the ground but for probably hundreds of years, other people had designs that could have been made to fly as well but technology in other areas hadn't progressed enough to give them that ability. I can just imagine if someone attempting to develop such an aircraft had legal action taken against them for violating a patent they might not even have known about.

The only reason why patents were even allowed in the U.S. was because of the potential indirect benefit it might provide to technological growth, but there's not a single direct benefit to any of this, nor are patents the only way inventors can get adequate compensation for their ideas. Instead of making technology a field of growing possibilities, the ideas of intellectual property instead seem to confine the viable field of research to continually fewer and fewer options, with fewer and fewer companies who feel less and less need to actually provide efficient and valuable services and instead simply assure they can sway enough legal clout to shut down alternatives ... wasn't it Microsoft that actually attempted to make a worldwide declaration that anyone using Linux was going to be sued simply because someone might have copied a couple dozen lines of code from Windows? Imagine if in sports the football industries could send police around and arrest anyone playing soccer because they copied the idea of kicking a ball? Ideas aren't owned by anyone except the person thinking them, in my book. If you want to charge someone, make sure they've agreed to the terms ahead of time - getting two people to agree one of them holds a monopoly on the idea doesn't make this true for everyone else in the world and doesn't justify using legal force to impose tha belief either. Besides, if people instead recognize the reality that ideas have few physical limits in the number of times they can be used and copied (which is a good thing despite the propoganda) then realistic protection schemes would instead be used that wouldn't have the weakness of simply hoping laws swing in your favor to earn a living and people could write software without having to wonder if they're breaking some law and customers wouldn't have to wonder whether if they're breaking the law by clicking the wrong button on the internet.

Looks like Microsoft is digging its own grave with this software... who, after this is willing to purchase a Genuine copy of windows, when they knew they were pirating in the first place... sounds like this is going to leave a hole in the OS market for less known OS's... hooray!