Microsoft Launches Comical Effort to Fight Piracy

theodp writes "A week before the release of Vista, Microsoft is expanding its fight against software piracy with a new educational effort that includes comics. Making its U.S. debut Monday, the Genuine Fact Files campaign aims to make Microsoft's message more accessible to a broader audience. BTW, Vista's Software Protection Platform (SPP) can put unvalidated copies of the software into a reduced-functionality mode. From the article: 'Microsoft plans to draw attention to it through banner ads on its Web sites and promotional material that it will hand out through partners. By using comics, the company aims to make the message more accessible to a broader audience. They are black and white, in a style similar to newspaper comics.'"

Comments

Re:So lon as they respect my right ...

[pipatron]

Rather don't. Since the Playstation 3 is from SONY, who are even more trigger-happy when it comes to DRM and artificial restrictions than Microsoft, you would still support it.

Re:Good for them!

[Speare]

Give up the fight, man, the word "pirate" in this usage is hundreds of years old.

There was very little trust in the print medium when it was first developed--it was seen as unstable and subject to piracy and fraudulent copying. Authenticity was hard to guarantee: indeed, the term "piracy" was first used by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, circa 1675, to describe certain pernicious practices of early printers and booksellers. A "pirate" was someone who participated in the "unauthorized reprinting of a title recognized to belong to someone else." "Stationers" eventually emerged as the trusted practitioners who were placed in charge of various aspects of publishing--practices we would now recognize as printing, publishing, editing, and bookselling. Stationers worked out the conventional practices of making books, and thus made printing a viable economic enterprise with the elaborate complexity of producing a book eventually invisible to all but the practitioners in the trade.

Re:Give us more than ONE FREAKIN KEY

[soft_guy]

This is precisely why Apple makes MacOS X, iLife, and iWork available in family packs that cost only marginally more.

Re:So uncool

[Schemat1c]

If from the beginning people didn't pirate windows, home computer use of windows would have been MUCH less. These people would then have not demanded windows for their work computers. I remember it the other way around, when 3.1 came out we practically had to force it on our users. The home pirating began when users were required to submit things in Word and Excel format and they needed to access these documents from home. Before that most people that had computers seemed perfectly content with Lotus and Wordperfect and if not they got a Mac.

Re:Good for them!

[shark72]

"Copyright infringement != piracy"

I agree 100% that many of us find it distasteful to use this word, but to claim that it does not have this meaning is, frankly, tilting at windmills.

The word "piracy" is an example of a homonym, or as some call it, a homophone. Type "dict piracy" into your Firefox toolbar (we're all running Firefox, right?) to get the following definition:

"2. the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy."

We're all smart enough not to confuse dogs and trees when we hear the word "bark," so it's disingenuous to suddenly pretend to be homonym-challenged.

Another common bit of misinformation is that this is some sort of new meaning of the word. Not so; it shows up in court rulings from the 19th century, and if you're lucky enough to have an OED around, it'll tell you a lot more about the etymology.

Again: you may find the definition distasteful. But there's no point in claiming that the definition does not exist.