Others agreed. An online survey conducted by Sina.com had 86 percent of 90,000 people polled saying that they wouldn't buy a legal copy because of the new antipiracy software.
"I respect the right of Microsoft to protect its intellectual property, but it is taking on the wrong target with wrong measures," said the lawyer who filed a complaint, Dong Zhengwei. "They should target producers and sellers of fake software, not users."
Dong's argument has been made before by American users, who have at times raged at WGA. In June 2006, Microsoft angered users by pushing a version of WGA to XP users via Windows Update, tagging it as a "high priority" update that was automatically downloaded and installed to most machines. A year later, a daylong server outage riled thousands of users who were mistakenly fingered for running counterfeit copies of Windows.
The 2006 incident sparked a lawsuit that accused the company of misleading customers when it used Windows Update to serve up WGA. That case is ongoing; last week, a federal judge granted Microsoft's request to keep technical details about WGA secret after the company claimed hackers could exploit the information if it were made public.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said the reaction is overblown. "It seems like they don't know how [the WGA Notifications update] is deployed. It's only installed after you've accepted the download," she said, responding to comments made by some Chinese users that they were surprised by the change. "It's possible they clicked without noticing [the Notifications license].
She also noted that the recent update is not the first time that Microsoft's software has come with antipiracy protection in China. "Odds are, this was probably not the first time you've seen a [WGA] notification if you're seeing it now," she said, referring to the older Notifications software that displayed only a log-on message and other warnings. Microsoft had also warned users last week that the change was coming, she said.
Dong was unconvinced. "The authorities should take action to protect citizens' property and privacy rights," he told People's Daily.
Also last week, Microsoft began distributing an update to Chinese users of Office that displays a pop-up when it detects a pirated copy of the application suite. The company began a pilot program of the new Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) notifications last April in Chile, Italy, Spain and Turkey, but at the time did not set a timetable for expanding the initiative.