"Software piracy and counterfeiting is a sophisticated, global trade with a damaging impact on consumers, businesses and economies"
damaging? how so? I see no damage to that lot. Maybe damage to Microsoft's bank account. But thats ok, 1 less Microsoft in the world. The better.
Pirates! you make Microsoft bigger, more popular, and more entangled into society by providing their software for free. You make innocent people dependent on crappy proprietary software. The novelty of having an expensive thing for free will always exist among "poor" people.
Humans in general are naive, "If its free, it cant be any good"; and conversely "OMG! thats $300 in the store, i'm getting it for free!!! wikid!!!"
Microsoft will always make money from its Server & Tools division. Using licenses and contracts. Piracy can never be a threat to them with the current infrastructure in place for software deployment.
Microsoft is being squeezed by Vista, and wants to milk every last bit out of their value chain.
Piracy is a solution to a problem people want.
Please use free software and stop piracy.
Ubuntu/Fedora/Suse, try a linux distro today!