To celebrate Global Anti-Piracy Day, The Pirate Bay has decided to replace their well known logo with the mugshot of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Below the mugshot it reads “Bill Gates made me do it,” referring to his ‘criminal’ history.
Although the company does send out DMCA takedown requests to BitTorrent site owners, Millions of Microsoft products are being pirated on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks every year.
Of course, Microsoft is doing all it can to prevent people from installing illegally obtained copies of their products, with their ‘Windows Genuine Advantage‘ system as the flagship solution. Similar to most other anti-piracy measures, it also hurts honest customers, as it has a false positive rate of more than 20%. The pirates will get what they want one way or another.
What Microsoft does not do, however, is sue individual downloaders. Unlike the RIAA they don’t think that the people who are potential customers are the right targets in their battle against piracy. Instead, they mostly target resellers who sell illicit copies of their products. “Legitimate businesses struggle to compete against these illegal resellers who undercut their prices and contribute to the 20 percent software piracy rate in the U.S.,” the company states.
The Pirate Bay has no commercial interests, but contrary to what Microsoft would have hoped for, they are not very responsive to letters from Microsoft either. In addition, we seriously doubt that ‘Global Anti-Piracy Day’ is the success they want it to be, now Bill Gates’ is on the frontpage of the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.
