John Darrow

Note that I didn't say the clauses were "illegal" (which would imply an actual law was passed making it a crime simply to write a license which attempted to apply such limitations); what the courts have repeatedly said is that such clauses are not legally enforceable, that if it looks like a purchase, it is a purchase, and that, as such, "licensing" terms cannot abrogate the rights that come with making a purchase. It's just that you're unlikely to get Microsoft people to admit as such, including many of the people you might talk to when calling to change the license - many will still pressure you to get a new license (at the very least burning up your time and running up your phone bill for this supposedly "FREE" call). It's along the same lines as their moving the COA/license key to unremovable stickers on the cases of the computers (instead of a card at the front of the software packet that comes with the computer, where they used to be) - they hope that if they make it difficult enough to actually carry out what is your legal right, you'll give in and do it their way even if they can't actually legally force you to do so. And maybe they even hope that somewhere down the line some court will actually side with them (and completely change the nature of consumer law) - but it hasn't happened yet. Look, if Malwarebytes wants to keep identifying AntiWPA using a misleading label, it's entirely within your rights to do so, just as it's within Microsoft's rights (in a legal, if not moral, sense) to prod users to follow license terms that aren't legally enforceable. Just realize that the justification for doing so is far more political than technical.

Let's get a few things straight: The first sentence's implication ("steal windows") does not necessarily follow from the second sentence. Not everyone who uses a tool which is sometimes used by crackers is a cracker. Some might even be security people themselves. The fact is, Windows' activation system is fairly braindead. Among the things it doesn't handle well are major hardware upgrades, and transferring of licenses from one system to another - the latter of which is a right of the end user as a corollary to the "doctrine of first sale", and has been upheld repeatedly by the courts in explicit repudiation of licensing clauses which may try to prohibit it. As long as Microsoft refuses to fix activation to reasonably handle these cases, said end users are basically forced to use tools like AntiWPA in order to make legitimate use of their legal rights. AntiWPA does not prevent updates. I've got a computer which has been running AntiWPA 3.3 for a couple of years now, in order to make use of the Windows XP Professional license from an earlier laptop which had died (the license key/COA is sitting on the desk in front of me, still attached to the plastic memory cover from the old laptop). It has never had any trouble obtaining updates, and receives the same set of updates as other computers I have which do not run AntiWPA and were activated the normal way. A user carefully installing AntiWPA for the purpose of making legitimate use of their legal rights is no more likely to infect their system with other malware than a user who has activated the usual way. In fact, they are probably less likely to have malware, as they have shown enough of a modicum of computer savvy to search out and vet AntiWPA and decide it is the appropriate tool for their needs. They might in fact even have read the publicly-available source code, tested it in a sandbox, and continued to monitor its activity after installation to make sure it isn't doing anything wayward. The simple fact is, labeling AntiWPA as "Trojan.I.Stole.Windows" is both technically incorrect and legally questionable (and, be aware, there are jurisdictions where knowingly making a false accusation of criminality is itself a criminal act), not to mention inappropriately snarky.