RE: Adobe adds product activation
From: Watson Laughton <WLaughton -at- orphan -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 11:42:01 -0500
X-Message-Number: 13
When Lotus 1-2-3 was the only game in town, the had a piracy-prevention
"tool" that was far less onerous than the activation procedure now required
by msft et al. if you wanted to use a personal copy of 1-2-3 on your
computer at work and continue at home (or the equivalent with a laptop), you
had to "uninstall" 1-2-3 from one computer and re-install it on the other
computer. When Excel, Quattro Pro, and other spreadsheets showed up on the
scene, Lotus magically dropped the copy protection scheme. Now, for all
intents and purposes, most users have no choice in what general business
software they use (either their company decides on msft, or they have to be
perfectly compatible with msft for outside distribution). No choice? No
problem! Copy protection is back. And now, I guess we have to buy THREE
copies of the software for a single user to move from work desktop to home
desktop to laptop. The joys of being an 800-pound gorilla.
Which is exactly why MS does *not* require activation on its software shipped to China, the country with the most notorious reputation for software piracy. The Chinese gov't is now working on its own version of Linux. MS must be worried that it will lose the mindshare of the Chinese market if it tries to enforce copyright protection. So the company that is most paranoid about software theft does not use its own copyright security system in the land that has the highest rate of software piracy. Better to have pirated MS software in use then none at all!
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