Yup, if you’re not pirating someone else’s property, what’s the problem?
If there is any place where property rights should be understood it’s this forum.
The US Constitution needs to have a personal privacy amendment.
I don't like running useless processes on my PC that have the ability to falsely invalidate my PC. The validation process in not 100% and false positives are possible. The solution would be a trip to tech support limbo which may or may not clear up the issue. So wasted cycles on my PC with the potential of wasted time dealing with tech support. Not to mention the question of what information is being sent to MS. That's the problem.
Well, I can tell you exactly where the problem is.
I run Parallels an a Mac, using Windows 7 as a guest OS, for the increasingly rare times I want to use a Windows program. I bought a legal copy of Windows 7 for this use and installed it a few months ago.
Everything ran fine for a while and then I suddenly got a message that my Windows 7 installation "could not be authenticated". Now, remember, I had authenticated it when I installed it, and I had made no hardware changes at all.
In this instance, the fix was both easy and not so easy. All I had to do was re-enter the activation number from the Windows 7 packaging, but I was traveling when this happened, and didn't have that stupid number with me.
Bottom line is that I couldn't use the program that I had bought and legitimately paid for for a period of two plus weeks, and in order to use it after that, I had to go through a lengthy and error-prone process of re-registration.
I feel that retroactively adding this requirement to the Windows 7 program is violating the terms of the EULA I purchased it under, and depriving me of its use for any period of time is an actionable illegal act. The only problem is that the amount of damages I could collect would be too small to make it worth the effort.
OTOH, I can easily foresee a class action lawsuit arising over this practice in the not too distant future.
I agree, after all, it’s a conservative, mostly Christian forum. No one here would condone anything illegal.
The problem is the "guilty until proven innocent" paradigm.
I paid for my copy of WinXP - yet for no apparent reason, it suddenly insists on installing (and often updating) something which makes me PROVE I'm not a thief, and prove it often. As others have recounted from their experiences, this puts me at risk of WinXP refusing to operate should a "false positive" ("could not validate") occur. One little statistically "acceptable" error rate turns into a major disruption of my life.
Kinda like submitting to a drug test when you know you're clean: there's a non-trivial chance you'll suffer a false positive, which can screw up your life pretty bad because some lab test goofed.
This attitude permeates society until it grows (read your Holocaust history) into "papieren, bitte" ("papers, please") = you're not a viable person unless you can show your government license to exist.
I'm offended when a company treats customers (me) as a possible, even probable, thief to the degree that they keep checking on the legality of something I _purchased_ (supposedly a one-time transaction).
I'm offended when I pay $25 for movie tickets or a DVD, only to have a "don't pirate!" message rubbed in my face.
I'm offended when society accepts that I must prove my innocence despite no hint of legal transgression.
I'm offended when simple airline travel requires examination just this side of a strip-search (and they're working on including that via "mm-wave scanners").
I'm offended when my government commandeers a simple driver's license into what is, for most practical purposes, a license to exist.
I paid M$ for their product, yet years later they're still checking on me - not because I show any sign of thievery, but because it's easy to check for me.
My upgrade path is to OS X as a result.
I believe in property rights. However, I recently bought the Star Trek blu ray dvd specifically for the 'bonus digital copy' included. I loaded the copy on my notebook, running windows 7 and Windows Media Player 12. After half a day of trying to get MP12 to 'upgrade its security software', I finally got it to load into MP 12. Now it won't play because MP 12 doesn't play DMP stuff. I copied it to my Droid, which also won't play because that doesn't play dmp. The so called digital copy can only be loaded on one computer and one other device, so I am hozed. From the internet, I have learned that if you roll your computer, it will no longer play these, forget about putting it on a replacemnt computer or cell phone. I just want my legal copy to play.