| WGA: Won’t Go Away anytime soon |
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| Written by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 06 December 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 4 Obviously this is because they wanted to get paid for their hard work in developing software that people liked enough to pirate and use, so they could earn enough money to work on the next version and other projects. Copy protection software was developed to prevent tapes or disks being copied, although these protections were usually circumvented or defeated in due course, as were hardware dongles. Early license keys had loopholes that pirates exploited, with online activation used to stop casual copying. Pirates often create a hack to bypass activation or by supplying a modified .exe file that bypasses activation but could also inject malware into the user’s computer, for banking fraud and identity and information theft, one of the potential pitfalls associated with the risks of using pirated software downloaded from the Internet. Piracy undeniably costs the global software industry many billions of dollars per year, but even so, the world’s software market is still thriving, from games to productivity software, to education, design, Internet security and plenty more, thanks to all the legal sales of software that happen on a daily basis globally. The software industry is also subject to the same battles of competition that is seeing software companies enhancing and upgrading their products much more regular basis, whether that software is an online application or one that resides on your hard drive. There are also the epic battles of commercial and open source software driving the development of free and open source alternatives to certainly all the major commercial non-game programs sold for Windows, the ever growing sophistication of today’s Internet and the ever more advanced nature of today’s computing hardware. Continued on page 2. |
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