They’ve all admitted selling pirated Microsoft software, and now they’ve all reached out-of-court settlements with the company they ripped off.
The 11 UK traders had all admitted the sale of illegal software and hard disk loading – which generally means the builders of the systems pre-installed unlicensed software. Now they’ve had to pony up to the company that makes the real software.
In at least one instance a company claims it didn’t know it was doing wrong, but will change things, as Christine Throup from PC Support said:
"We’ll be working with Microsoft over the next few weeks to make sure what we do falls within their software rules from now on."
Meanwhile, Graham Arthur, anti-piracy attorney at Microsoft UK, issued a warning:
“The majority of legal action that we take is driven by complaints or leads from people who want to help us stop pirates profiting at their customers’ expense."
"We receive 45 emails every week to our UK piracy alias and in total take action against 10 rogue traders every month. Customers also need to be on their guard online because Microsoft takes down more than 250 internet auctions each week.”
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