Wednesday, August 29, 2007  

[Genuine (Dis)Advantage...]

I've been a PC Magazine subscriber for several years now and one of the articles I look forward to reading are the columns by John Dvorak. His views on the direction of technology, the Internet, and sometimes social issues are always interesting and presents a different view of looking at normal, everyday events.

His latest column was about how Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers crashed over the weekend and thousands of users who have certain versions of Windows installed on their systems were locked out because their systems could not "dial home" to check if that copy of Windows was genuine.

I thought it raised several interesting points. Such measures are put in place to thwart piracy. But the thing is, people who use pirated software (or the release groups) would have found some way to disable this little measure. So really, the only people these measures work on are the people who have paid for legitimate copies of Windows. Does that sound right?

The same goes for the entertainment industry selling DRM-laden MP3s and what-have-you. People who download them for free elsewhere would be able to enjoy totally unrestricted use of the file. People who go legit have to, instead, deal with files that were restricted and couldn't be played on this or that, cannot be burned, copied, etc. Why place such restrictions on people who actually paid for your product?

^^^ by Locksley @ 10:58 AM. 0 comments.
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