Do Ozzie's benign comments on piracy, combined with a recent change to the anticounterfeiting technology within Windows XP, mean Microsoft is softening its stance?

No, says Cherry. "I don't see these really changing what Microsoft thinks about piracy."

An update to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notifications, the tool that determines whether the operating system is legitimate or not, has added a new, third category to its piracy flags. Dubbed "indeterminate," the new class lets WGA hedge. When a system's copy of XP is tagged as indeterminate, the user is directed to online resources to troubleshoot the problem but is not necessarily pegged as a pirate.

"The changes in the wording, that you're 'stolen' or 'legit' or 'indeterminate,' doesn't matter," argued Cherry. "If you see a failure [of WGA validation], you're still going to think that they're calling you a crook. But because there was no bad faith on the part of people who ended up with the bad copies [of XP] due to no fault of their own, Microsoft wants to add this 'indeterminate.' "

Microsoft has been hammered by some users and bloggers over WGA -- in particular, for how often users are falsely accused of running an illegitimate copy of Windows and for its refusal to get specific on the percentage of such "false positives."