"The total number of what might be actual false positives found over the past year amount to only a fraction of a percent," Alex Kochis, a senior licensing manager at Microsoft, wrote on a corporate Microsoft blog this week.
About one in five of the 300 million PCs that have run WGA validations fail, according to Kochis. That is pretty much in line with industry numbers for software piracy, he wrote.
Windows Genuine Advantage is a stepped-up effort by Microsoft to boost the number of Windows users who actually pay for the operating system. The company has said that roughly a third of Windows copies worldwide have not been acquired legitimately--as a boxed product or bundled onto a machine, for example.
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This blog usually reserves judgment on the stories and lets them speak for themselves, but we feel that MS goes too far on this. We have heard of false "negatives" for people that have a valid copy of windows. Also we have heard of numerous people that while breaking the "letter" of Microsoft’s license have abided by the spirit. I am talking about users who bought a machine loaded with XP only to discover later if they had any problems they had no choice but to wipe and reload from a "restore" partition. Gee, they didn't want to do this, go figure. They found a way around it, but now they are pirates. Or, are they?
