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Single Software Licence Shared 774,651 Times
nk497 writes "A single licence for Avast security software has been used by 774,651 people after it went viral on a file-sharing site. Avast noticed that a license for its paid-for security software, sold to a 14-user firm in Arizona, was being distributed online. Rather than shut down the piracy, the company decided to see how far the software would spread — it's since popped up in 200 countries, including the Vatican City. Now, the company is turning it into a marketing opportunity, with a pop-up encouraging users of the pirated copy to download a legal copy of the free or paid-for version. Avast isn't sure how many pirates have gone legal, but said some have made the switch."
The Vatican is a soverign state that does not have a software treaty with the US, so no infringement there ...
There was a time when the algorithm for testing Microsoft keys was that the sum of the digits was divisible by 7 (I think). Setting every digit to 7 was the simplest way of doing this, although there were other options were possible. I often used these instead of bothering to look up what the actual value should have been.
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I would love to see how they worded their pop-up so as not to offend people or scare them away.
ATTENTION! The Virus Software you are using has been pirated.
Please put in your name and credit card number, and you will be legally licensed.
The last thing I want to do, if caught pirating something inadvertently is to provide my identification.
You can see it near the bottom of this page.
I was mildly disappointed at how scary they made it look, but meh. It’s not like they were telling the users anything they probably didn’t already know, and I’d say that the music industry has successfully waged a shock&awe campaign to inform people of what, exactly, they can do to you if they catch you making unauthorized copies. I’d have been much more impressed if they had tried to present a more friendly and informative message. Something along the lines of:
Simple, to the point, and non-scary.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
But Avasts free product is pretty good as well, and the only 2 features that the pro version has that the free version doesn't is
Neither of which seem like killer features to me. The free version of Avast does however require you to go to their website and register, enter the licence key into the product and repeat when the license expires.
I wonder if the scale of this pirating shows that people prefer a simpler solution (see Note #1) more than it shows that people prefer a free solution?
Note #1: At least 1 step in the process is removed, the registration step. Possibly the next step as well, the pirate version may not require the install to enter the license number either, although I've not used the pirate version so could say for sure.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.