My wife asked me to design and print some bookplates for my daughter’s school. I used Microsoft Word to browse some templates in their online collection, selected one I liked, and tried to download it. Word told me that it needed to validate my copy of office in order to proceed, so I clicked okay. After a few seconds, Word reported that I was probably a victim of counterfeiting, since my copy of Word could not be validated.
This surprised me, since I had updated to Word 2007 only a few days prior, and had personally activated the product. Moreover, when I followed the instructions on the Microsoft website to resolve the issue, Word informed me that my copy of Word had already been validated.
Diving into the Microsoft knowledge base, I was able to download a Firefox browser plug-in to diagnose validation issues with Microsoft Office. This finally gave me the correct answer: at the same time that I installed Word, I had also updated Microsoft Project and Visio. I had never started either application prior to attempting to download the template. Because these two applications have not been activated, the interface to the online template Gallery, which is shared amongst all office applications had decided that I was using pirated software. It apparently does not distinguish between "hasn’t had the opportunity to be activated just yet" and "must be a pirated copy."
Activating these other two applications fixed the problem.
So the message is doubly misleading: it did not indicate that the problem originated in a completely different application, and it presumed "software counterfeiting" since it did not recognize the fact that I simply had not run every one of the Microsoft applications I had just upgraded to yet.
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I understand Microsoft’s desire to reduce pirating, but the activation thing is annoying. I’ve had it bite me a few times, especially with the OS. It always defaults to the "You pirate, you stole this, or it was stolen on your behalf" instead of "oops, for some reason I cannot validate right now." It reminds me of the saying "Creating laws only creates criminals" or in Microsoft’s case "Creating activation restrictions only creates more pirates." I seriously doubt they have put a dent in the overseas pirating of their software, but they manage to upset their legitimate users and brand them as thieves.
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