In the latest salvo of its ongoing war against software piracy, Microsoft late Monday announced the filing of 21 lawsuits in federal court in 14 states against resellers who it claims have been illegally distributing its software. Sharon Cates, an antipiracy attorney at Microsoft, says many of the resellers targeted have been using a tactic known as hard disk loading, which involves taking a single piece of software and loading on multiple PCs, and then selling those PCs to unwitting customers.
In this scenario, not only do customers run the legal risks involved with using unlicensed software, they also lose out on upgrade rights, access to technical support, and key security protections, Cates said. Hard disk loading also leads to Microsoft"s honest channel partners being undercut by unscrupulous resellers, she added. "A lot of people don"t know what kind of media they are supposed to get when they buy a PC, and that makes it easier for the software pirate to fool customers," Cates said.