The business launch of Windows Vista is only a few days behind us and already the attempts to pirate Windows Vista are underway. Recently I stumbled on news of a rogue KMS servers that has appeared on the internet with information on how to activate a copy of Windows Vista VL against the server. Once activated your illegal copy of Windows Vista will be good for 180 days before it needs to talk to the KMS server again.
KMS, which stands for Key Management Service, is part of the Volume Activation 2.0 scheme to protect Windows Vista and Longhorn Server from piracy. As part of your license agreement with Microsoft you agree to not bring up a KMS server on the public internet. This server is a clear violation of that agreement, which I doubt they had.