There’s been the odd rumour here and there that Microsoft is colluding with copyright holders from time to time. One rumour suggested that Longhorn, now known as Vista, would not play unlicensed content. Of course, rumours like that eventually fell apart sometime during the release of the OS. This is what makes the notion that Windows 7 is designed for piracy.

The report comes from Wired via CNN where the author put together 7 reasons to use Windows 7. One of the reasons to switch to Windows 7? Piracy will now be a breeze:

Yarr! We know there are plenty of you out there downloading pirated digital booty, especially in Windows land. But it’s never been convenient to be a pirate compared with being a paying customer. For example, if you’re a legitimate buyer purchasing movies off iTunes, you can easily stream your media to your legitimately purchased Apple TV. If you’re a pirate, you’d have to go through roundabout programs and hardware to re-create the experience.

Windows 7 is an OS practically made for pirates. Want to display your movies, photos or music on your TV? Bam! Windows Media Player will do that out of the box if you have a Wi-Fi enabled TV, or an Xbox. No extra programs to install: Windows Media Player seamlessly communicates with your Wi-Fi device to display your illegal content in all its glory on your fancy HD TV.

And sharing media is easy, too. Want to download all of your brother’s music? Bam! HomeGroup, an easy networking feature included in Windows 7, will make that super easy between computers running the OS. Immediately upon plugging in to your network with Ethernet or Wi-Fi, HomeGroup will ask if you wish to join the group on the network, allowing you to set up easy file sharing in minutes.

It’s more than likely that this reason is a little tongue and cheek, though it’s doubtful groups like the RIAA would be laughing. Still, some Windows supporters in the past have suggested that Microsoft continues to dominate in the OS market, in part, thanks to not actually proving the rumours that there would be a form of trusted computing that would quash all forms of unauthorized content.

It’s unclear how Microsoft would actually handle the label of Windows 7 as being a Piracy Operating System, but content being shared between computers isn’t an entirely new thing for Windows given the shared directory has been part of a Microsoft Operating System for quite some time now – not to mention the whole concept of networking computing.

Regardless, it’s hard not to see the humour in the idea that Windows is “made for pirates”. We can already see the sales being higher than expected already.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

There are those that hear the same old tired scapegoat. Profits down? Blame piracy. Sales down? Blame piracy. Sales up? It’s in spite of piracy and there could be more sales. Profits up? It’s in spite of piracy and they could be higher. Who knew that a major software giant would use piracy to their legal advantage?

It’s an interesting development. According to ALB Legal News located in Australia, “Microsoft may have a viable legal defence against its first ever anti-monopoly claim in China, given the prevalence of pirated Microsoft products in the country and how “market share” is defined by the Chinese authorities.”

The report further comments:

When lawyer Dong Zhengwei, a partner with Beijing-based Zhongyin law firm grabbed the headlines by alleging that Microsoft was using its dominant market share to manipulate software prices in China and calling for a US$1bn fine to be imposed on the global software giant, Microsoft global VP Zhang Yaqin was quick to reply with an interesting counter argument: “Microsoft did not even have the preconditions of conducting monopoly activities in China,” he said “genuine Microsoft products have a very low market share in China because its products are widely pirated.”

It may be a form of confirmation that major corporations need piracy at some point in their existence to gain an edge in the market. While most examples point to long-term solutions, this may be one of the few instances that it’s actually going to help the corporation in the short term.

The debate over whether or not piracy actually helps the major incumbent industries has been around for years. The timing on this, though, is interesting given that it was only late last month that Russell McOrmond pointed to an article on how software piracy actually aids proprietary software in the war between proprietary software and open source/free software.

While the excuse may be convenient for Microsoft at this point, it’s doubtful the company will be thanking software pirates afterwords if the legal argument works.

From May 31, anybody using a beta copy of the OS will find that their machine reboots every two hours, and that intermediate access will be limited to base-level file retrieval. That means that you could lose data you’re working on, and that your machine will be good only for reformatting.

This isn’t as bad news as it seems. Users who had taken part in the Vista beta scheme – millions of people, in fact – were all given free copies of Vista Ultimate by the Vole as a ‘thank you’.

We suspect that this is more likely to affect those individuals who were using copies of the Vista beta nicked from mates or from BitTorrent in a bid to avoid having to pay for the full thing. The quick phase out means that this is possibly the shortest post-release beta Windows has seen.

The calculation is based on Microsoft’s public statements that the company pays over $100 million each year in legal fees alone to protect itself from some 35 to 40 patent lawsuits. Recently, Microsoft has forked over significant sums to other technology companies to settle patent disputes: $1.25 billion to Sun, $536 million to Novell, and $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent are just some examples. The total payouts over the last three years add up to more than $4 billion dollars.

SFLA took the total of $4.3 billion dollars in legal costs for Microsoft from 2001 to 2004 and divided it by estimated sales of Windows XP over the same period—approximately 200 million copies—to come up with the $21.50 estimate. The organization added that North American and European customers, who pay more for Windows licenses than customers in other parts of the world, actually ended up paying more of this “patent tax,” and that people who pirate Windows pass their share of the tax on to paying customers.

The study concludes by pointing out that Linux, as a free and open-sourced operating system, has no “patent tax” at all, and suggests that this be taken into consideration when choosing operating systems for deployment in places such as schools.

Earlier this month, pirates found a way to spoof Microsoft’s Key Management Service (KMS) server using a VMware image. The software hack allowed pirates to run copies of Windows Vista Business and Enterprise for up to 180 days.

The folks over at Engadget have come across another exploit that allows users to permanently activate Windows Vista using crack files and some registry trickery. The TimeStop Vista cracks only works on 32-bit versions of Windows Vista, so those looking to crack 64-bit versions of the operating system may be out of luck.

The crack effectively stops the countdown times to mandatory Vista activation and freezes the countdown timer at 43,200 minutes (30 days). The countdown timer will not reduce any lower than 30 days.

Continue reading to see the screenshots and also to download Dr. Chang’s Windows Vista permanent activation crack.

After cracking, type “slmgr.vbs -xpr” and it says that windows is permanently activated.

The world’s largest software maker said Wednesday that people running a version of Windows Vista that it believes is pirated will initially be denied access to some of the most anticipated Vista features. That includes Windows Aero, an improved graphics technology.

If a legitimate copy is not bought within 30 days, the system will curtail functionality much further by restricting users to just the Web browser for an hour at a time, said Thomas Lindeman, Microsoft senior product manager.

Under that scenario, a person could use the browser to surf the Web, access documents on the hard drive or log onto Web-based e-mail. But the user would not be able to directly open documents from the computer desktop or run other programs such as Outlook e-mail software, Lindeman said.

Earlier this year, the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Microsoft 32.5 billion won ($34 million) and ordered it to provide two separate versions of Windows, saying the company abused its dominant market position by tying certain software to its Windows operating system.

In compliance with the ruling, Microsoft will release two new versions of Windows on Thursday, a company official said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy.

One of them will be stripped of Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger and the other carries links to Web pages that allow consumers to download competing versions of such software, he said.

Apple at its annual World Wide Developers Conference has lashed out against Microsoft for copying features of Mac OS X 10.4 in the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.

“Our friends up north spend $5 billion a year on research and development,” Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said in reference to Microsoft.

“And yet these days all they seem to be able to do is try and copy Google and Apple. So I guess it’s a good example of how money isn’t everything.”

Sources had previously told Reuters that the advisory committee would decide against the U.S. software group and that another meeting was scheduled to take place on July 10 to decide the size of the fine.

In March 2004 the Commission said the software giant was abusing its dominant position of its Windows operating system and ordered it to give information to rivals so they could create software that runs smoothly with Windows.

But since then, the Commission charged Microsoft with what it saw as foot-dragging in handing over reliable and accurate information to the rivals.