Windows 7 Piracy Prevention to be less annoying

With Windows 7 RC, we’ve seen that Microsoft is starting to come out of the anti-piracy bubble by giving away Windows 7 RC to everyone for a year.

Today, the Redmond company took another step forward by announcing a new change to Windows 7′s anti-piracy technology that will make it less annoying and obtrusive. Windows 7′s activation is built on the same software protection platform that was part of Vista, with some minor tweaks.

• In Vista, when users were prompted to activate the product, the Activate Later option would be greyed out for 15 seconds. Windows 7 will have no such delay. When the Activate Later option is selected, Windows 7 will display a dialog box with information on how activation could help them identify if their copy of Windows 7 was genuine.

The anti-piracy features in Windows 7 and Vista will now be known as Windows Activation Technologies. In Windows XP, it was known as Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and received a lot of negative rep over the years. Microsoft’s reasoning for this was that the anti-piracy technology in Windows 7 was fundamentally different than the one used in XP.

Here are some of the comments from General Manager of Worldwide Genuine Windows at Microsoft, Joe Williams.

First and foremost, we want to increase customers’ confidence in Windows and their computing experience. The foundation of a great experience is great software, and we can only guarantee that if a copy of Windows is genuine. The malicious code and malware that counterfeit software can expose our customers to is a serious threat — ask anyone who has ever been a victim of identity theft. So ensuring that customers know they have genuine software or when they might be victims of software piracy is just as much a priority now as ever. With Windows Vista, we made significant strides in reducing the threat pirated copies posed to customers, our partners and Microsoft software, and we anticipate we’ll do even better with Windows 7.

The full interview can be read at Presspass

Related posts:

1. Microsoft blacklists leaked Lenovo OEM Windows 7 Key
2. Microsoft to rework Windows 7 UAC to be less annoying
3. Windows 7 Ultimate cracked and activated with OEM master key