Microsoft chips away at piracy in the UK

Microsoft's door-to-door campaign to ferret out copyright infringers in the U.K. has reduced the piracy rate for its software sooner than expected, company officials said Thursday.

The company's "Keep IT Real" program, launched in February, has cut the piracy rate for Windows XP from 16.7 percent to 12.4 percent for the Windows XP OS said Michala Alexander, head of antipiracy for the U.K.

"We were really pleased to see the rate dropping so quickly," she said.

At the program's onset, Microsoft said it wanted to reduce the rate to 11.7 percent within three years, but now aims to hit that goal by next February, Alexander said.

Microsoft gives partial credit for the piracy decline to its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, an application on client computers that checks with the company's servers to see if the OS copy is legitimate.

Microsoft calculated the drop in piracy using WGA, Alexander said. The latest figures show that of some 31 million copies of Windows in the U.K. that have been checked, 12.4 percent of those are illegitimate copies.

The Keep IT Real program takes an aggressive approach, with teams of investigators visiting resellers and PC builders in person and emphasizing the terms and conditions of licensing agreements. Software Asset Management teams also drop in to Microsoft customers and audit software licenses.

Company investigators found 13 customers were using some 5,000 pieces of counterfeit software, including Office, Windows Server and Windows OS, Alexander said. Microsoft is also currently suing seven companies for allegedly selling unauthorized software in the U.K.

Microsoft will turn its sights now on counterfeit copies of Office, Alexander said. Up to 33 percent of the copies of Office are not authorized software, often propagated through casual sharing, she said.

The figure is taken from a similar tool on Microsoft's Web site that checks to see if Office is legitimate. About 1 million people in the U.K. have checked so far.