Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Microsoft: "We're not pirates, you are"

Everyone loves to hate Microsoft and sometimes the vitriol unleashed on the software giant is not without a degree of justification.

Take the issue of software piracy for example.

To be fair, Microsoft loses a snot-load of money every year to the unlawful duplication and use of their products.

Sometimes these people are just regular folks who figure they'll save themselves a few hundred dollars by using a cracked version of Office, Windows or whatever. Other times however, they are businesses who have made a conscious decision to effectively steal from Microsoft by illegally duplicating and selling their wares.

Well it's probably not much of a surprise to find that Microsoft don't like it when people steal their intellectual property.

That's what a bunch of Kiwi businesses discovered to their cost recently when they were caught out and ended up admitting liability and paying compensation so as to avoid prosecution through the courts.

Interestingly enough, despite being New Zealand businesses, the names of most caught out don't sound traditionally Kiwi: Al-Huseiny Ibrahim, Linjiang Yu, Jun Li and Ayman Franso (according to NBR).

But should those in glass houses be careful about throwing stones and calling others pirates?

Is Microsoft being just a little hypocritical when they bitch and moan about people like these ripping off their intellectual property?

Unfortunately, they are.

And (as coincidence would have it), this has been made abundantly clear in the past few days when an Australian inventor successfully sued Microsoft for infringing his patent rights.

Ric Richardson's Uniloc company has won an astonishing US$388 million award from US courts after he successfully argued that Microsoft had been using his patented software licensing system without license.

It seems that back in 1993, Richardson showed his software to Microsoft on the strict conditions that they would not duplicate or crack it -- but, at least in the eyes of a US court, they reneged on that agreement.

Which kind of leaves Microsoft with egg all over its face doesn't it?

"Thou shalt not steal our intellectual property" has a somewhat more hollow ring when it comes from the mouth of a company that's just been found to have done exactly the same thing itself.

To make things even worse for Microsoft, they've come out claiming that they prefer to deal with issues of piracy outside the courts. In a story (which inspired today's column) written by Chris Keall of NBR, a Microsoft spokesperson is quoted as saying “We’re not in the business of punishing people or dragging them through the court... we want people to realise and admit what they’ve done”.

Yet, for a company that's so court-averse, Microsoft says it will be appealing the Uniloc decision and going back to court in an attempt to avoid the US$388m it's now being asked to pay for stealing Ric Richardson's intellectual property.

I suspect that the real reason Microsoft doesn't like dragging small businesses through the courts is because they know they'd be unlikely to recover their costs, let alone see a single penny of any compensation awarded by those courts. It's not benevolence, it's simple commercial commonsense so to dress it up as something other than that is disingenuous at best.

Of course I'm not suggesting that just because Microsoft feels justified infringing other people's intellectual property rights that anyone ought to unlawfully copy or use their software. It's time everyone realised that when it comes to software you can either buy the product, choose not to use it at all, or find an open-source equivalent.

There really is no justification for piracy -- either by individuals, small businesses or huge corporates.

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say on this...

PERMALINK to this column

Oh, and don't forget today's sci/tech news headlines

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font