The Pirates of Peking

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Some thoughts from my colleague Jessie Jiang on piracy:

The failure of millions of computer screens to go black on Monday was almost an anticlimax for many Chinese Windows users. According to Microsoft’s much-awaited anti-piracy plan, millions of PC users in China would turn on their computers on October 20 only to find a black screen that recurred once an hour and a permanent dialogue box that kindly reminded that they were using pirated software. Only about five percent Windows XP users have reported suffering the black screen so far, despite an estimated piracy rate of 75 percent in China.

Although there has been sporadic eruption of web outrage over Microsoft’s hard-line policies, Chinese netizens have generally been surprisingly tolerant — and they have good reason to be. So far, the campaign against piracy, officially the Windows/Office Genuine Advantage programs (WGA/OGA,) has been no match for China’s sharp-minded geeks. A quick search for “微软WGA破解补丁” (meaning Microsoft WGA decode patch) on baidu, the primary Chinese search engine, returns about 7,400 results. Most of them provide free downloads to wipe out inconveniences like recurring notifications that Microsoft thought would discourage the use of software knockoffs. As for the black screen and annoying dialogue box, a range of solutions were already being doled out on the internet even before Microsoft could unveil its grand crackdown plan.

The flimsy WGA program is of course not Microsoft’s only way of combating piracy in China. During the weeklong national holiday earlier this month, Microsoft “slashed” its price for Office 2007 Home and Student Edition from $102 to $29 – though the cheaper version only contained one product key, and therefore could only be used on one PC. In comparison, the normal-priced version will function on three different computers. Sales of the genuine software reportedly increased tenfold during that week, but most of the country’s buyers were still not impressed. According to an online survey conducted by the People’s Daily, 78.1 percent of its over 11,000 participants voted for further price reduction as the best way for Microsoft to counter piracy, compared to the mere 0.6 percent votes for programs like WGA.

By now, most of us should agree that it’s probably dumb to try to scare people off by occasionally turning their screens black. So why does Microsoft keep doing it? My take is that they are using this to inculcate a sense of shame, much like the way city officials get people to pick up their dog’s poop in public parks. The only difference: pirated software users in China never wind up getting tickets or facing charges, because there is no such law in the first place. Still, while the current carrot-and-stick is far from perfect, the golden lining for Microsoft is that, with its over-90-percent market share (piracy included) in a country that takes up one fourth of the world’s population, even a tiny tilt toward compliance translates into a lot of cash.