Salon is currently running an article examining the state of piracy in China and a memorandum of understanding between the Chinese government and Microsoft that indicates MS it taking a much different approach to piracy than in the past. Here''s the tagline from the article:

quote: Evidence is mounting that cracking down on software copyright infringement may not be good for business. Case study: Microsoft in China.

And here''s the article itself: Profits from piracy The gist of the article seems to be "if you can''t beat ''em, join ''em" - that is to say - take advantage of your illegal user base in addition to your legal user base. This strategy seems well suited for Microsoft with an OS and related applications, but how would this work out for games? I can see how a company with a "franchise" game - such as Id or Blizzard might be able to gain some advantage from this approach, but it seems to me that it wouldn''t work well at all for smaller companies and startup companies. At any rate, I found the article interesting and I would like to hear what others have to say about it. -Mike

Perhaps I missread the article, but I couldn''t see where or how Microsoft is going to "profit" from piracy. It seemed more to say that Microsoft was going to abandon their attempts to stop piracy in China because it costs more to fight the problem in China than the problem costs them in the first place, and that they would instead focus on working with the Chinese government to develope a new market there (one designed to go over piracy, perhaps Internet based software/services).

i think the point is that microsoft allows the piracy of its OS to continue, ensuring that there is a larger userbase tied into microsoft systems.. it then invests into the chineses software companies producing programs for their OS, there software is pirated less than american software, and there is the added insentive for the chinese government to do something to increase its own software industry.