20 years ago it was so easy to pirate windows that the worst thing they would do to you is put a small translucent text in the bottom corner of the screen and say the version was pirated. They would also refuse to ship their bloatware through patches — but would still supply the security updates (the only ones that mattered). Then the geniuses decided to remove desktop background (turning it black). That’s about the time I realized I didn’t want a background anyways because it just made my screen too bright.

If anything Microsoft encouraged and made it easier to pirate with every release of windows XP, which was the last version I seriously used.