Generally speaking, we're not crazy about the idea of extending Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day outside of its rigidly-defined boundaries; we just feel that gratuitous smackdowns that otherwise have little to nothing to do with the subject matter at hand work best when apportioned out in regular doses. But c'mon, it's not like anything else much is happening, right? So when it came to light that Microsoft, one of the industry's biggest and most vocal opponents of software piracy, may itself be using unlicensed and illegally obtained software to produce its own products, well, that probably warrants a mention now instead of being sat on until Friday.

See, faithful viewer DeeKay told us that the folks at PC Welt went poking around in the bowels of Windows Media Player's program files (well, maybe not "bowels," exactly; considering it was just an easily browsable folder in the Help directory, it was more like the esophagus) and discovered nine WAV sound files that contain background music for the Windows Media Player Tour-- and something else, too. When opened in Notepad, after the binary-file gibberish that appears when you do such things, there's a mention of "Sound Forge 4.5" and something called "Deepz0ne." A little digging revealed that "Deepz0ne" is a cofounder of Radium, a warez group that specializes in, ahem, "liberating" music software from its copy protection schemes-- software like Sound Forge, whose 4.5 version was cracked by Deepz0ne and illegally distributed for free.

The obvious conclusion, of course, is that the music for the Windows Media Player Tour was produced with pirated software that normally sells for $400 a pop. That's in the same ballpark as the price of Microsoft Office, and considering how many times Microsoft has had the Business Software Alliance raid corporate offices looking for pirated copies of Word and Excel, there's a definite "Piracy Is Evil Unless We're Doing It" vibe emanating from Redmond. It's funny, but when we think of Microsoft stealing intellectual property, we think more along the lines of them imitating a user interface for inclusion in their own inferior products, not trolling the P2P trackers for a free cracked copy of Doom 3 or whatever.

As The Register points out, it's just as likely that Microsoft got the sounds out of a royalty-free sound effects library, or outsourced the work to someone else who used the pirated software-- of course, that's not nearly as entertaining as concluding that computers all across Microsoft's campus are crawling with billions of dollars of pirated software, so that's what we're going to do. Heck, we bet they've also got terabytes of illegally downloaded music and Hollywood movies sitting on the company file servers. And porn! Tons of porn! Including the seriously dodgy stuff that gets people tossed into jail. Attention, lawyers and law enforcement authorities: you know what to do. Faster, pussycat! Kill! KILL!