To those who are young and born into the era of the Internet that made you think that you entitled to many things Free.
Until the 1985-90 the only thing Free was Toasters or Mixers given by Banks to people that Deposit over $1000, and small samples of cosmetics given to Women in Department stores.
Oh, I wouldn't slam the millennials too much on that count. They're saving money at a greater rate than their predecessors -- for good reason, and almost as though they've become reincarnations of Greatest Generation folks who went through the Depression.
On the other hand, some of them seem to have a myopic understanding of history. I had met one young woman at the smog-testing center's TV lounge five years ago, and we struck up a conversation in which I raised the name of Robert MacNamara. She didn't know who he was. So when I mentioned the Cold War, she responded "Oh! We learned about that in high-school! That's when we were fighting the Columnists!"
The legal notion of intellectual property and copy-protection lagged behind the natural larcenous inclinations of people who'd become ebullient about the new technology in the '80s. I remember someone had marketed a piece of software that would allow duplication of a Lotus 1-2-3 floppy. You could duplicate any MS-DOS disk. Of course, in those days, the software followed the medium on which it was stored -- a floppy disc. Many of the machines of the mid-80s weren't yet equipped with hard disks.
At the same time, a programmer working for an organization couldn't technically seek copyright on a piece of software he'd developed at work, until around 1987, when PC Week (a news magazine) announced that a circuit court judge had ruled such individuals were entitled to do that.
Except for my exploitation of Win2K-Pro's lack of copy protection -- an indulgence which didn't lead to any "income" beyond what I'd acquire with a single computer -- I never had a problem with Microsoft's growing ability to knit the OS to the hardware for OEM releases.
But I worry about this issue we're discussing at the moment. As far as I know and for Windows 7, you could use another legitimate product key to activate an installation with any install disc bearing any other product key. The "key" . . . was the key to it all.
On the one hand, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." On the other, MS has made money hand over fist because they're a dominant firm in a spectrum including monopoly at one end and perfect competition on the other. Patents are short-term monopolies granted to inventors and corporations to encourage people to seek a gold mine through innovation.
One can argue that there's "competition" because users have a Linux or similar option. They could get Sun-Micro's Open Office for free, or they could buy Corel WordPerfect for much less than Office. But the herd goes with the dominant firm, and the dominant firm calls the shots. This then provides an upper hand in controlling prices -- which both MS and Intel relentlessly do.
What is "fair compensation" for this type of intellectual property? At minimum, it would cover the declining average fixed cost of R&D, the ongoing costs of maintenance, revision and customer support. But a user may have little choice; he may "need" to have the MS software or OS, because that's what everyone in his organization uses, it's what OEMs bundled with the machines. The anti-trust suits against MS have already been mentioned in that regard. Like the monopolist, the dominant firm can charge "whatever the market will bear," as opposed to what entities on the demand side would feel inclined to pay. That, too, can be discussed in the context of "entitlement."