Microsoft has been enhancing its effort in combating software piracy since the "black screen" campaign was conducted in 2008. On December 13th, Microsoft China announced to initiate dissemination activities on software protection in some 40 cities in Chinese mainland. The company also said that it will take legal action against 16 device distributers who pre-installed pirated copies of Windows series in computers before selling them to end users. Microsoft is now negotiating with those computer dealers and will bring them to court if necessary. This move came after the lawsuits filed by Microsoft against nine Chinese computer dealers this July.
Those 16 device distributors are all authorized by brand computer manufacturers including Acer, Asus, Dell, Founder, Shenzhou, Hedy and HP. Microsoft believed that pirated copies of software in computers on sale were not necessarily pre-installed by those preeminent computer manufacturers, but should be done by individuals or distributors for the sake of cost saving.
Nick Psyhogeos, deputy director of the OEM department of Microsoft, urged computer distributors to stop infringing activities and compensate Microsoft for its loss. If they refuse to do so, Microsoft will seek solutions by legal means.
Experts analyzed that Microsoft is now facing multiple challenges from its competitors such as Apple and Google and the sales revenue of its PC products has encountered a decline for the first time. Hence, it may want to promote its Windows 8 by combating piracy.
According to Microsoft, from October 2012 the company had stopped selling Windows series in the form of CD, DVD and U disk in China, where consumers could then gain access to legal versions of Windowsonly by two means including downloading the software from Microsoft official website or using pre-installed application in computers, after all the old stock of Windows 7 version is sold out.
After years of constant efforts made by Chinese government, China has achieved considerable progress in promoting licensed software, said Microsoft. The judicial departments have paid more attention to software theft, and the compensation amount has increased. However, software piracy is still rampant in consumer market. In 2004, the pirate rate of Windows series reached up to 90% in China, while in 2006, the proportion has decreased to 82%. Microsoft declined to reveal the pirate rate this year.
According to Nick Psyhogeos, Microsoft's investigation carried out by randomly selecting PC samples in IT markets in 40 cities across the country indicated that 91% of the computers installed with pirated Windows versions had their security settings tampered with or had other security loopholes, and 59% such computers were invaded with malware.
(Source: IPR in China)
