mep916

Microsoft should offer the ability to go online, enter your product key, validate it, then allow you to download an ISO with the latest Service Pack. Although I believe it's the responsibility of the license holder to backup their disk and protect it, I don't see anything wrong with making it as easy as possible to legally obtain a replacement installation pack.

Ninja, you should reply to the email and see if they offer anything like that. I doubt it, but I'd like to at least read her response.

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tlarkin

They want to do that, but they want to charge you a subscription fee. Would you be willing to pay say $150/year for that service?

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mep916

No, I wouldn't. Outside of this subscription scheme, they should allow license holders to download replacements for free, so long as the holder can provide sufficient evidence that they own the copy. Nothing is fraud-proof, but I'm sure they could come up with a fair system... if they wanted to.

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Respital

Just to add to this, they could even use torrents if they aren't willing to spend the money on the extra bandwidth needed for the downloads, as I'd imagine they'd be quite high.

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tlarkin

Bandwidth, servers, power and other utilities plus the labor to upkeep is not free. A subscription fee would almost be a must in their views.

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Respital

We can only hope they learn one thing from open source, and that's to use torrents to share it. Lets face it all they would have to do is have a few computers upload it to others and maybe offer lets say a cash bonus of $5 for each one iso fully uploaded.

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Strokes

Heres what I think. You may not have violated the EULA, But in Microsoft's eyes you did. Is Torrenting illegal? In the USA thats debatable, but in Canada it is. I live in the US and so far have not been contacted about it. If the police show up at my house with a warrant, thats one thing. But if it's some slack jaw from a film/music/software/game company with out a warrant, he wont be in business much longer. This is just my opinion and nothing more.

What would the government rather do? Fight cyber terrorism or see if Joe Shmoe torrent the latest movie/music?

Irishwhistle

Torrenting is 100% legal, and I'm pretty sure someone in Canada can download the latest Linux torrent... maybe I'm wrong though. It's a problem with the people using the torrents, not the torrents themselves.

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Carlton

Making an ISO available for download, that's a real good idea. I also agree that people should be responsible for backing up the digital media whether it be OS's, music, or dvd's. It would seem that law makers (DMCA) and as well as software and entertainment vendors don't agree (CSS, Securom etc). I understand companies needs and desires to protect themselves from pirates but it should not trump any and all rights for customers to protect their purchases.

Carlton

Torrenting is not illegal in Canada. Sharing movies, music and non free Windows software is a gray area at the very least. Most frowned upon is making these files available to others.

I live in Canada and regularly seed various Linux distro's (15MB cable connection ), it's not even close to illegal.