Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage antipiracy technology hasn’t won over many fans other than, perhaps, the Business Software Alliance, a long-standing industry organizations devoted to combating software piracy. Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage technology has garnered a solid chorus of booing from pundits, technology advocates, and consumers alike, in part because errors in the system have labeled legitimate customers as possible software pirates, and a much-publicized service outage last August left many customers in a lerch. And these complaints omit the privacy concerns: Microsoft Genuine Advantage enables Microsoft to remotely check out a user’s computer and product identification to look for possible piracy. If it finds something it deems suspicious—or simply malfunctions—it can disable access to features and functions until it’s satisfied the user has made good.
