Oh dear: Microsoft Australia’s anti-piracy propaganda

7

Microsoft Australia has been getting serious about anti-piracy measures for a while.

It was only several weeks ago, for instance, that the company backed a call for Australian governments to create specialised cyber cops to track down software pirates and bring them to justice. That came after a few raids in the past few years that have seen local distributors of allegedly pirated software charged.

But now the company appears to be stepping up its fight against pirates with an ‘educational video’.

It features a guilt-ridden eBay merchant, Vojislav Klaic, who was busted for selling copies of Windows, and then using the proceeds to buy “shirts and shoes”, as well as chilling “you’ve just been called to the principal’s office” music.

Microsoft director of intellectual property Vanessa Hutley makes an emotional plea to the audience at the end of the video.

“We want people to understand that you are part of a chain. It may seem inconsequential to you. But it isn’t. These people are trading on your belief that it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t have a consequence. It does matter, and it does have a consequence,” she says.

Oh dear.

7 COMMENTS

  1. Knowingly selling counterfeit goods is fraud, a significant step above piracy. I suspect the reason Microsoft doesn’t show us the “consequences” of downloading a copy of Microsoft Word over bittorrent is because there are none.

Comments are closed.