Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement Manual - Ipr-policy.eu

Brand Protection Manual
Microsoft
Microsoft is the world’s largest software company, with nearly 90,000 employees in
more than 100 countries and annual revenues exceeding $60 billion. The company
develops a variety of products and services, including the popular Microsoft Windows
operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of business software applications. The
company’s global success, however, has attracted the attention of international criminals seeking
to capitalize on the popularity of the company’s products. Software piracy costs the global
economy billions of dollars each year, undermines innovation and local economic growth, and
poses serious risks to Microsoft’s customers and partners worldwide.
So how does the software giant tackle the complex issues posed by software counterfeiting
and piracy “Our global anti-piracy strategy is designed to protect our customers and partners
around the world from the threat of software piracy through our Genuine Software Initiative.
This initiative is based on three E’s—engineering, education, and enforcement,” says David
Finn, associate general counsel for Worldwide Anti-Piracy and Anti-Counterfeiting. “We
engineer products to make them difficult to counterfeit and pirate, educate our customers and
partners about counterfeiting and piracy, and take balanced civil and criminal enforcement
action to shut down the pirates.”
ENGINEERING
On the engineering front, Microsoft has made significant investments in world-class security
features and technologies. One example of this is Microsoft’s product activation technology,
which is designed to limit illegal copying of software and provides customers with their own
unique key for support and services. “We know we can’t do this by ourselves, so we’ve teamed
up with pioneers in disk and print security,” says Finn. Those pioneers include companies like
Technicolor, which produces Microsoft CDs and DVDs using highly proprietary embedded
holographic disk technology that makes the disks extremely difficult to successfully counterfeit.
Microsoft also works closely with international secure print manufacturers that supply
Microsoft with the latest security technologies for its paper software licenses, certificate of
authenticity labels, and other packaging. As Finn points out, “These technological advances,
along with improved education and awareness-building efforts, make it easier for our
consumers to spot a fake.”
Microsoft’s experience shows that consumers have a major stake in doing their part to purchase
and use genuine Microsoft software. Nightmarish stories abound about people who bought
pirated software just to save a few dollars and then ended up paying an even bigger price down
the road. “Pirated software can contain unknown security vulnerabilities or simply not work at
all,” Finn explains. “Some counterfeit software has even been found to contain viruses, Trojans,
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