The launch of Windows 10 marked a turning point in how Microsoft markets its flagship operating system. Until then, each new version of its operating system had a cost , something that changed with the arrival of Windows 10. It became the first operating system that the Redmond-based company offered free of charge to all users who had a legal version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.x installed.
It's often been said that Microsoft has never seemed to care much about the number of computers running pirated versions of Windows, regardless of the specific version, but nothing could be further from the truth. The latest news from the United States is that the company is trying to identify approximately 1.000 activations performed using licenses stolen from distributors.
Microsoft has apparently filed a lawsuit in Seattle against the IP address of the pirates who fraudulently obtained the licenses. How were they able to do this? Simply through the IP address from which all those licenses were activated . It seems the pirates were obtaining license numbers from various supply chains—licenses that had already been sold on computers sold by those retailers.
Given that Microsoft had a list with all the registration numbers of all the versions that had been stolen, identifying the IP address was not so difficult, since computer forensics technology allows not only the identification of the numbers used in the activations but also the establishment of strange activation patterns, such as the activation of more than a thousand licenses from a single IP address.
What is clear is that the company is not going to go one by one to find out which user has a pirated license on their computer , since it would be practically impossible to know, without having access to the computer, who was the user who first installed and activated the Windows 7 or Windows 8.x license.