NEWS Microsoft has announced it's suing eight PC resellers over claims they haven’t been using genuine Certificates of Authenticity (COA).
The COAs are usually labels which come attached to a PC or piece of software to indicate it's a real Microsoft product. Following a sting operation, Redmond found several resellers attaching the COAs to counterfeit products or using counterfeit COAs.
Bonnie MacNaughton, senior attorney in Microsoft's law and corporate affairs group, said the lawsuits were only filed after the resellers had been given information and notification that they were breaking the law, and encouraged them to use legitimate software.
The software giant has been researching the trade in fake COAs by buying up a load of labels and products, and checking their validity. As well as discovering a trade in Asia for making bogus labels, Microsoft found some dodgy resellers removing the labels from genuine products and adding them to pirate copies.
The COA crackdown is part of Microsoft's attempt to take on the software pirates. Recently, it announced it will replace pirate versions of Windows XP with genuine ones.
Comments
There is 1 comment. Join the discussion
1. royston
so you buy a pirate copy of xp for a fiver and microsoft wil update it to a full legal copy for you for nothing......sounds like a great way to buy xp for peanuts.are microsoft just trying to get more people useing xp no matter how they get it or is something else going on here? there is an old saying "you dont get something for nothing in this world" there is an instance of this on the net(up until a few days ago)buy as many o2genie sims as you want for 99p each.(on ebay by the way) fantastic loads of people bought em by the shedload and sold em for 6-10 pounds each an made a huge profit. whats to stop pirates makeing copies of nown xp disks and makeing a huge profit at microsofts expense in much the same way in a very short period of time as well.i,m sure microsoft are up to something here as even they are not this idiotic, or are they.