It Takes Microsoft Clout to See Anti-piracy progress in China

China is the second largest economy in the world and still has high software piracy rates. In this Computerworld article there is a informative discussion of the benefits Microsoft has seen with its anti-piracy strategy. According to the article sources, Microsoft was able to recover or convert pirated licenses revenue to the tune of $164M in one quarter. This type of revenue recovery confirms that any ISV can potentially recover revenue because real businesses are using pirated software. However, Microsoft is in a unique position to combine technology and political clout to see these gains. Although, smaller ISVs will not have resources, money, and connections to sustain an anti-piracy campaign like Microsoft there are some lessons learned:

• Used a combination of activation and data collection to aid forensic identification of infringements
• Using in country partner representation and relationships to follow-up and enforce licensing

Based on V.i. Lab’s experience we believe this means additional anti-tampering technologies to prevent crack groups from creating binary patches that disable activation and license enforcement or recover key generation algorithms.

- Vic