Microsoft has a tool for crackdown on online piracy

When it comes to software piracy, Microsoft has been the one to lose millions of dollars on each and every pirated copy of its Windows OS for over two decades. However, the Redmond giant has a weapon in its arsenal to wipe out piracy from its visionary platform – cloud computing.

In a recent patent filed by Microsoft, there is a mention of a tool limiting cloud features for a user marked as a “repeated offender” after trying to share pirated content with another person several times. With this tech, Microsoft won’t have to manually remove any pirated content from its servers.

The patent describes that objects in a shared storage system can be marked as including prohibited content. Incidents that result in objects being so marked can be stored in an incident history associated with a user responsible for those objects. The incident history can be processed to identify repeat offenders and modify access privileges of those users.

However, as pointed by Softpedia, the patent was filed back in 2013 and the publication date is registered as 2015. Therefore, it seems that Microsoft had some time to develop it further and may have implemented some part of the tech into its cloud systems already. So, pirates, beware!