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Microsoft Wins Windows XP WGA Lawsuit
Rish writes "A lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers to download and install an update for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) under the guise that it was critical security update has been tossed out. Last month, a federal judge refused to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would have meant anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 could join the case without having to hire an attorney, and on Friday the same judge dismissed the case completely."
That does not always work. I replaced the motherboard on my GF's PC and reinstalled Windows. WGA would not activate. She spent about an hour on the phone trying to get a human at Microsoft. When she finally did, she was told that there was nothing they could do.
This was a retail copy of XP that she paid over $100 for. Microsoft has her $100, she has no OS. Those of you who like to compare piracy to theft, this is what real theft looks like.
I did put her on Ubuntu for quite a while, until she decided that she couldn't live without Freehand MX (which has some problems under wine). So we pirated XP. Seems fair to me.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Two things. On your first paragraph, all it takes is someone unfamiliar with the terminology to say something that doesn't mean what she thinks it means and you're in the wrong part of the call script. Given how confused the average end-user gets when faced with terms like CPU, PC, memory and so on, this is fairly easy to happen. Say Microsoft asks if the CPU was replaced, and the caller thinks that means the whole case thing, which hasn't been changed. (There's plenty of people who call the whole box the CPU.) Immediately you're going the wrong way, because the activation codes say "new CPU" but the customer says "no, same CPU".
On the second, a DVD player is a physical product. I have absolutely no qualms about replacing DVD DISCS that have failed with copies I made from friend's originals or rentals. About 2% of my collection has failed in this manner, more 20 discs, including the very first James Bond DVD releases. (I couldn't find a trace of the UPCs on imdb.com or amazon.ca; it's like the studios disavowed those particular pressings.)
So making a pirated copy of Windows when you have the retail box, store receipt and original disc? What's wrong with that? You've met the terms of the license agreement, but a technical fault is preventing you from using the software. Overcoming that fault does not make you a software pirate.
I have done similar things with commercial software. The company took our money for a particular configuration, but their license manager won't allow that configuration to be enabled. So I decompiled the code and removed the license manager. We pay our annual maintenance and are well within the legal terms of our support contract, it's just a defective technical limitation that's in the way.