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MS moves to mandatory registration

Retail versions of Office 2000 will require a form of user registration --
or the software will disappear.
By Lisa M. Bowman, ZDNet News
UPDATED February 10, 2000 11:28 AM PT

New users of Office 2000 will get a taste of Microsoft Corp.'s latest
anti-piracy measure: forced registration.

The company is inserting a new feature into an upcoming release of its word
processing software that will cause the product to malfunction if a person
doesn't register after launching it 50 times. Users of volume licenses, such
as those working at big companies, won't have to register.

The so-called Registration Wizard doesn't require users to give any more
information than their country of origin, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said. And
they can register anonymously through fax, phone, e-mail or snail mail.

The company clashed with privacy experts over Office 97 last spring, when it
was discovered that some Word and Excel documents contained code numbers
that could identify the source of the document. Microsoft quickly issued a
patch and now says Office 2000 documents will not have a similar identifier.

The Registration Wizard has been part of a two-year-long pilot program,
which was designed as an aggressive move to combat software piracy.

"Counterfeiting is a big problem. What makes it even more difficult is the
Internet," said Jackie Carriker, who works on Microsoft's anti-piracy
efforts.

The Web makes it easy for pirates to buy and sell software, sometimes to
unsuspecting consumers. In January, the company succeeded in taking down 100
sites that distributed counterfeit copies of Windows 2000, a product that
isn't scheduled to launch until next week. The number of counterfeit
distribution sites has grown to 2 million in 1999 from 100,000 in 1997,
according to industry trade groups.

Microsoft also is adding new anti-piracy features to Windows 2000, including
a hologram that covers the entire CD-ROM and a new certificate of
authenticity.




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